Amorphous and Polycrystalline Routes toward a Chiral Spin Liquid

We show that a chiral spin liquid spontaneously emerges in partially amorphous, polycrystalline, or ion-irradiated Kitaev materials. In these systems, time-reversal symmetry is broken spontaneously due to a nonzero density of plaquettes with an odd number of edges n₎₃₃. This mechanism opens a sizable gap, at small n₎₃₃ compatible with that of typical amorphous materials and polycrystals, and which can alternatively be induced by ion irradiation. We find that the gap is proportional to n₎₃₃, saturating at n₎₃₃∼40%. Using exact diagonalization, we find that the chiral spin liquid is approximately as stable to Heisenberg interactions as Kitaev's honeycomb spin-liquid model. Our results open up a significant number of noncrystalline systems where chiral spin liquids can emerge without external magnetic fields.