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Nematic and chiral orders for planar spins on triangular lattice
We propose a variant of the antiferromagnetic XY model on the triangular
lattice to study the interplay between the chiral and nematic orders in
addition to the magnetic order. The model has a significant bi-quadratic
interaction of the planar spins. When the bi-quadratic exchange energy
dominates, a large temperature window is shown to exist over which the nematic
and the chiral orders co-exist without the magnetic order, thus defining a
chiral-nematic state. The phase diagram of the model and some of its critical
properties are derived by means of the Monte Carlo simulation.Comment: minor change
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