Comment on "Chiral ordering in a frustrated quantum spin system"

Abstract

The symmetry properties of an operator recently introduced by Richter, Gros, and Weber in the context of the ${\mathit{J}}_{1}$-${\mathit{J}}_{2}$ frustrated Heisenberg model in two dimensions are studied. Richter et al. claimed that the enhancement of this operator with ${\mathit{J}}_{2}$/${\mathit{J}}_{1}$ indicates the existence of strong ``chiral'' correlations in the model. However, we show that this operator transforms identically as a previously analyzed ``spiral'' operator and thus their physical content, including energy gaps in the spectrum, are the same. Thus, we argue that there are no clear numerical indications of chiral order in the ${\mathit{J}}_{1}$-${\mathit{J}}_{2}$ model.