Emergence of chiral spin liquids via quantum melting of noncoplanar magnetic orders

Quantum spin liquids (QSLs) are highly entangled states of quantum magnets which lie beyond the Landau paradigm of classifying phases of matter via broken symmetries. A physical route to arriving at QSLs is via frustration-induced quantum melting of ordered states such as valence bond crystals or magnetic orders. Here we show, using extensive exact diagonalization (ED) and density-matrix renormalization group (DMRG) studies of concrete $SU(2)$ invariant spin models on honeycomb, triangular, and square lattices, that chiral spin liquids (CSLs) emerge as descendants of triple-Q spin crystals with tetrahedral magnetic order and a large scalar spin chirality. Such ordered-to-CSL melting transitions may yield lattice realizations of effective Chern-Simons-Higgs field theories. Our work provides a distinct unifying perspective on the emergence of CSLs and suggests that materials with certain noncoplanar magnetic orders might provide a good starting point to search for CSLs.