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Updated: Sep 7, 2025

Optimizing Magnetic Force Microscopy Resolution and Sensitivity to Visualize Nanoscale Magnetic Domains
Published on: July 20, 2022
Spiral Spin Liquid on a Honeycomb Lattice
Shang Gao1,2, Michael A McGuire2, Yaohua Liu1
1Neutron Scattering Division, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Oak Ridge, Tennessee 37831, USA.
Abstract:
Spiral spin liquids are correlated paramagnetic states with degenerate propagation vectors forming a continuous ring or surface in reciprocal space. On the honeycomb lattice, spiral spin liquids present a novel route to realize emergent fracton excitations, quantum spin liquids, and topological spin textures, yet experimental realizations remain elusive. Here, using neutron scattering, we show that a spiral spin liquid is realized in the van der Waals honeycomb magnet FeCl_{3}. A continuous ring of scattering is directly observed, which indicates the emergence of an approximate U(1) symmetry in momentum space. Our work demonstrates that spiral spin liquids can be achieved in two-dimensional systems and provides a promising platform to study the fracton physics in spiral spin liquids.
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