Spontaneous hall effect in the spin liquid phase of Pr2Ir 2O7

Abstract

An electric current flowing through a conductor in a magnetic field produces a transverse voltage drop known as the Hall effect. In the absence of the field, this effect also appears in ferromagnets in a plane normal to its spontaneous magnetization vector owing to the spin-orbit coupling. Generally, it may also detect a nontrivial order parameter breaking the time-reversal symmetry on a macroscopic scale, for example, scalar spin chirality. Here, we present our recent results in the study of the frustrated magnetism and Hall transport of the metallic magnet Pr2Ir2O7. Strikingly, a spontaneous Hall effect is observed in the absence of both an external magnetic field and conventional magnetic long-range order. This strongly suggests the existence of a chiral spin liquid, a spin-liquid phase breaking the time-reversal symmetry. Both our measurements indicate that spin-ice correlations in the liquid phase lead to a non-coplanar spin texture forming a uniform but hidden order parameter: the spin chirality. © 2011 Published under licence by IOP Publishing Ltd.