General symmetry arguments, dating back to de Gennes, dictate that at scales longer than the pitch, the low-energy elasticity of a chiral nematic liquid crystal (cholesteric) and of a Dzyaloshinskii-Morya (DM) spiral state in a helimagnet with negligible crystal symmetry fields (e.g., MnSi, FeGe) is identical to that of a smectic liquid crystal, thereby inheriting its rich phenomenology. Starting with a chiral Frank free energy (exchange and DM interactions of a helimagnet) we present a transparent derivation of the fully nonlinear Goldstone mode elasticity, which involves an analog of the Anderson-Higgs mechanism that locks the spiral orthonormal (director or magnetic moment) frame to the cholesteric (helical) layers. This shows explicitly the reduction of three orientational modes of a cholesteric down to a single-phonon Goldstone mode that emerges on scales longer than the pitch. At a harmonic level our result reduces to that derived many years ago by Lubensky and collaborators.

• Received 3 February 2011

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevE.83.051701