We propose a general theory of microwave absorption spectroscopy for symmetry-breaking synthetic antiferromagnets (SAFs). Generally, inhomogeneity or different thickness of the two ferromagnetic sublayers of a SAF results in the intrinsic symmetry breaking, while out-of-plane components of dc magnetic fields lead to the extrinsic one. The broken symmetry of SAFs excludes the original symmetry-protected crossing between pure in-phase and out-of-phase resonance modes with opposite parity. Alternatively, new frequency branches become hybridization of original bare modes in terms of symmetry-breaking-induced magnon-magnon coupling, which results in an indirect gap in ferromagnetic resonance frequencies. Also, the dependence of gap width on the degree of symmetry breaking for several typical cases are presented and compared with existing experiments. Our theory provides a simple but physical understanding on the rich structure of ferromagnetic resonance spectra for asymmetric SAFs.
The richness in both the dispersion and energy of antiferromagnetic magnons has spurred the magnetism community to consider antiferromagnets for future spintronic/magnonic applications. However, the excitation and control of antiferromagnetic magnons remains challenging, especially when compared to ferromagnetic counterparts. A middle ground is found with synthetic antiferromagnet metamaterials, where acoustic and optical magnons exist at GHz frequencies. In these materials, the magnon energy spectrum can be tuned by static symmetry-breaking external fields or dipolar interactions hybridizing …
We study a bilayer structure consisting of an antiferromagnetic insulator and a normal metal. An electron current is driven in the normal metal with direction parallel to the interface between the materials. Due to interfacial exchange coupling between the localized spins in the antiferromagnet and the itinerant electrons in the normal metal, a magnon current can then be induced in the antiferromagnet. Using an uncompensated antiferromagnetic interface, creating an asymmetry in the interfacial coupling to the two degenerate magnon modes, we find that it is possible to generate a magnon spin-cu…
We predict that a temperature gradient can induce a magnon-mediated spin Hall response in an antiferromagnet with non-trivial magnon Berry curvature. We develop a linear response theory which gives a general condition for a Hall current to be well defined, even when the thermal Hall response is forbidden by symmetry. We apply our theory to a honeycomb lattice antiferromagnet and discuss a role of magnon edge states in a finite geometry.
In this Letter, we study the spin Nernst effect (SNE) of magnons in the nonlinear response regime. We derive the formula for the nonlinear magnon spin Nernst current by solving the Boltzmann equation and find out that it is described by an extended Berry curvature dipole of magnons. The nonlinear magnon SNE is expected to occur in various Néel antiferromagnets without Dzyaloshinskii-Moriya interaction. In particular, the nonlinear spin Nernst current in the honeycomb and diamond lattice antiferromagnets can be controlled by strain/pressure.
In this work, we theoretically study the magnon spin transport in easy-plane antiferromagnetic insulators in the presence of an in-plane magnetic field. By exactly calculating the magnon spectrum, we find the band splitting due to the magnetic anisotropy can be fully compensated by the external field at a particular strength, which makes its dynamics nearly equivalent to an easy-axis antiferromagnet. As a result, the intrinsic magnon spin Hall effect due to the dipole-dipole interaction, previously predicted in easy-axis antiferromagnets is activated in easy-plane antiferromagnets. The compens…
We theoretically investigate the transport of magnon orbitals in a honeycomb antiferromagnet. We find that the magnon orbital Berry curvature is finite even without spin-orbit coupling and thus the resultant magnon orbital Hall effect is an intrinsic property of the honeycomb antiferromagnet rooted only in the exchange interaction and the lattice structure. Due to the intrinsic nature of the magnon orbital Hall effect, the magnon orbital Nernst conductivity is estimated to be orders of magnitude larger than the predicted values of the magnon spin Nernst conductivity that requires finite spin-o…
We present a theoretical study of excitations formed by hybridization between magnons and phonons - magnon-polarons - in antiferromagnets. We first outline a general approach to determining which magnon and phonon modes can and cannot hybridize in a system thereby addressing the qualitative questions concerning magnon-polaron formation. As a specific and experimentally relevant case, we study Nickel Oxide quantitatively and find perfect agreement with the qualitative analysis, thereby highlighting the strength of the former. We find that there are two distinct features of antiferromagnetic mag…
We explore routes to realize electrically driven Bose-Einstein condensation of magnons in insulating antiferromagnets. Even in insulating antiferromagnets, the localized spins can strongly couple to itinerant spins in adjacent metals via spin-transfer torque and spin pumping. We describe the formation of steady-state magnon condensates controlled by a spin accumulation polarized along the staggered field in an adjacent normal metal. Two types of magnons exist in antiferromagnets, which carry opposite magnetic moments. Consequently, and in contrast to ferromagnets, Bose-Einstein condensation ca…
We consider a hybrid structure formed by graphene and an insulating antiferromagnet, separated by a dielectric of thickness up to $d\simeq 500 \,nm$. When uncoupled, both graphene and the antiferromagnetic surface host their own polariton modes coupling the electromagnetic field with plasmons in the case of graphene, and with magnons in the case of the antiferromagnet. We show that the hybrid structure can host two new types of hybrid polariton modes. First, a surface magnon-plasmon polariton whose dispersion is radically changed by the carrier density of the graphene layer, including a change…
We investigated the topological property of magnon bands in the collinear magnetic orders of zigzag and stripy phases for the antiferromagnetic honeycomb lattice and identified Berry curvature and symmetry constraints on the magnon band structure. Different symmetries of both zigzag and stripy phases lead to different topological properties, in particular, the magnon bands of the stripy phase being disentangled with a finite Dzyaloshinskii-Moriya (DM) term with non-zero spin Chern number. This is corroborated by calculating the spin Nernst effect. Our study establishes the existence of the non…
Gilbert damping is a key property governing magnetization dynamics in ordered magnets. We present a theoretical study of intrinsic Gilbert damping induced by magnon decay in antiferromagnetic metals through $s$-$d$ exchange interaction. Our theory delineates the qualitative features of damping in metallic antiferromagnets owing to their bipartite nature, in addition to providing analytic expressions for the damping parameters. Magnon-induced intraband electron scattering is found to predominantly cause magnetization damping, whereas the Néel field is found to be damped via disorder. Depending …
A magnon spin-orbit coupling, induced by the dipole-dipole interaction, is derived in monoclinic-stacked bilayer honeycomb spin lattice with perpendicular magnetic anisotropy and antiferromagnetic interlayer coupling. Linear crossings are predicted in the magnon spectrum around the band minimum in G valley, as well as in the high frequency range around the zone boundary. The linear crossings in K and K' valleys, which connect the acoustic and optical bands, can be gapped when the intralayer dipole-dipole or Kitaev interactions exceed the interlayer dipole-dipole interaction, resulting in a pha…
In the absence of an external magnetic field and a spin-polarized charge current, an antiferromagnetic system supports two degenerate magnon modes. An applied thermal bias activates the magnetic dynamics, leading to a magnon flow from the hot to the cold edge (magnonic spin Seebeck current). Both degenerate bands contribute to the magnon current but the orientations of the magnetic moments underlying the magnons are opposite in different bands. Therefore, while the magnon current is nonzero, the net spin current is zero.
We present the detection of the spin-flop transition in the antiferromagnetic van der Waals material MnPS3 via thermally generated nonlocal magnon transport using permalloy detector strips. The inverse anomalous spin Hall effect has the unique power to detect an out-of-plane spin accumulation which enables us to detect magnons with an out-of-plane spin polarization; in contrast to strips of high spin-orbit material such as Pt which only possess the spin Hall effect and are only sensitive to an in-plane spin polarization of the spin accumulation. We show that nonlocal magnon transport is able t…
We study theoretically domain wall (DW) magnons-elementary collective excitations of magnetic DWs -- in easy-axis layered van der Waals (vdW) antiferromagnets, where they behave as normal modes of coupled spin superfluids. We uncover that, due to spin-charge coupling in vdW magnets, such DW magnons can be activated by voltage-induced torques, thereby providing a path for their low-dissipation and nanoscale excitation. Moreover, the electrical activation and the number of DW magnons at a frequency can be controlled by applying symmetry-breaking static magnetic field, adding tunability of signal…
In this work, the rich ground-state structure of orthogonally-coupled symmetric all-antiferromagnetic junctions with easy-plane anisotropy is reported. Spin reorientation process rather than the traditional spin flop (SF) occurs, resulting in a novel phase in which Néel vectors preserve the mirror-reflection symmetry (termed as ``MRS phase"). The phase transitions between SF and MRS phases can be either the first- or second-order. After disturbed by external stimuli, magnons with different parities emerge. For in-plane dc fields, no couplings between magnons occur. When dc fields become obliqu…
We report broadband microwave absorption spectroscopy of the layered antiferromagnet CrCl3. We observe a rich structure of resonances arising from quasi-two-dimensional antiferromagnetic dynamics. Due to the weak interlayer magnetic coupling in this material, we are able to observe both optical and acoustic branches of antiferromagnetic resonance in the GHz frequency range and a symmetry-protected crossing between them. By breaking rotational symmetry, we further show that strong magnon-magnon coupling with large tunable gaps can be induced between the two resonant modes.
Magnon excitations in antiferromagnetic materials and their physical implications enable novel device concepts not available in ferromagnets, emerging as a new area of active research. A unique characteristic of antiferromagnetic magnons is the coexistence of opposite spin polarization, which mimics the electron spin in a variety of transport phenomena. Among them, the most prominent spin-contrasting phenomenon is the magnon spin Nernst effect (SNE), which refers to the generation of transverse pure magnon spin current through a longitudinal temperature gradient. We introduce selected recent p…
Antiferromagnetic materials host pairs of spin-up and spin-down magnons which can be described in terms of a magnonic pseudospin. The close analogy between this magnonic pseudospin systems and that of electronic charge carriers led to the prediction of fascinating phenomena in antiferromagnets. Recently, the associated dynamics of antiferromagnetic pseudospin has been experimentally demonstrated and, in particular, the first observation of the magnon Hanle effect has been reported. We here expand the magnonic spin transport description by explicitly taking into account contributions of finite-…
In this work, we study magnon-magnon coupling in synthetic antiferromagnets (SyAFs) using microwave spectroscopy at room temperature. Two distinct spin-wave modes are clearly observed and are hybridised at degeneracy points. We provide a phenomenological model that captures the coupling phenomena and experimentally demonstrate that the coupling strength is controlled by the out-of-plane tilt angle as well as the interlayer exchange field. We numerically show that a spin-current mediated damping in SyAFs plays a role in influencing the coupling strength.
The Stern-Gerlach (SG) effect is well known as the spin-dependent splitting of a beam of atoms carrying magnetic moments by a magnetic-field gradient, leading to the concept of electron spin. Antiferromagnets can accommodate two magnon modes with opposite spin polarizations, which is equivalent to the spin property of electrons. Here, we propose the existence of an all-magnonic SG effect in antiferromagnetic magnonic system, where a linearly polarized spin-wave beam is deflected by a straight Dzyaloshinskii-Moriya interaction (DMI) interface into two opposite polarized spin-wave beams propagat…
We investigate the intrinsic magnon spin current in a noncollinear antiferromagnetic insulator. We introduce a definition of the magnon spin current in a noncollinear antiferromagnet and find that it is in general non-conserved, but for certain symmetries and spin polarizations the averaged effect of non-conserving terms can vanish. We formulate a general linear response theory for magnons in noncollinear antiferromagnets subject to a temperature gradient and analyze the effect of symmetries on the response tensor. We apply this theory to single-layer potassium iron jarosite KFe$_3$(OH)$_6$(SO…
We propose the weak localization of magnons in a disordered two-dimensional antiferromagnet. We derive the longitudinal thermal conductivity $κ_{xx}$ for magnons of a disordered Heisenberg antiferromagnet in the linear-response theory with the linear-spin-wave approximation. We show that the back scattering of magnons is enhanced critically by the particle-particle-type multiple impurity scattering. This back scattering causes a logarithmic suppression of $κ_{xx}$ with the length scale in two dimensions. We also argue a possible effect of inelastic scattering on the temperature dependence of $…
We study the exchange between electron and magnon spins at the interface of an antiferromagnet and a heavy metal at finite temperatures. The underlying physical mechanism is based on spin torque associated with the creation/annihilation of thermal magnons with right-hand and left-hand polarization. The creation/annihilation process depends strongly on the relative orientation between the polarization of the electron and the magnon spins. For a sufficiently strong spin transfer torque (STT), the conversion process becomes nonlinear, generating a nonzero net spin pumping current in the AFM that …
Magnon-photon coupling in antiferromagnets has many attractive features that do not exist in ferro- or ferrimagnets. We show quantum-mechanically that, in the absence of an external field, one of the two degenerated spin wave bands couples with photons while the other does not. The photon mode anticrosses with the coupled spin waves when their frequencies are close to each other. Similar to its ferromagnetic counterpart, the magnon-photon coupling strength is proportional to the square root of number of spins $\sqrt{N}$ in antiferromagnets. An external field removes the spin wave degeneracy an…
We investigate the performance of niobium nitride superconducting coplanar waveguide resonators towards hybrid quantum devices with magnon-photon coupling. We find internal quality factors ~ 20000 at 20 mK base temperature, in zero magnetic field. We find that by reducing film thickness below 100 nm internal quality factor greater than 1000 can be maintained up to parallel magnetic field of ~ 1 T and perpendicular magnetic field of ~ 100 mT. We further demonstrate strong coupling of microwave photons in these resonators, with magnons in chromium trichloride, a van der Waals antiferromagnet, wh…
Strong coupling between magnon and electromagnetic wave can lead to the formation of a coupled spinphoton quasiparticle named as magnon-polariton. The phenomenon is well studied for ferromagnetic systems inside microwave cavities in recent years. However, formation of magnon-polariton is rarely seen for an antiferromagnet (AFM) because the strong coupling condition is not easily fulfilled. Here we present time-domain terahertz measurement on a multiferroic polar antiferromagnet Fe2Mo3O8. We find clearly beating between two modes at frequencies above and below the electric-active magnon frequen…
The controllable magnetic skyrmion motion represents a highly concerned issue in preparing advanced skyrmion-based spintronic devices. Specifically, magnon-driven skyrmion motion can be easily accessible in both metallic and insulating magnets, and thus is highly preferred over electric current control further for the ultra-low energy consumption. In this work, we investigate extensively the dynamics of skyrmion motion driven by magnon in an antiferromagnet using the collective coordinate theory, focusing on the effect of magnon polarization. It is revealed that the skyrmion Hall motion driven…
We generalize the concept of the spin-momentum locking to magnonic systems and derive the formula to calculate the spin expectation value for one-magnon states of general two-body spin Hamiltonians. We give no-go conditions for magnon spin to be independent of momentum. As examples of the magnon spin-momentum locking, we analyze a one-dimensional antiferromagnet with the Néel order and two-dimensional kagome lattice antiferromagnets with the 120$^\circ$ structure. We find that the magnon spin depends on its momentum even when the Hamiltonian has the $z$-axis spin rotational symmetry, which can…
We theoretically study magnon-phonon hybrid excitations (magnon-polarons) in two-dimensional antiferromagnets on a honeycomb lattice. With an in-plane Dzyaloshinskii-Moriya interaction (DMI) allowed from mirror symmetry breaking from phonons, we find non-trivial Berry curvature around the anti-crossing rings among magnon and both optical and acoustic phonon bands, which gives rise to finite Chern numbers. We show that the Chern numbers of the magnon-polaron bands can be manipulated by changing the magnetic field direction or strength. We evaluate the thermal Hall conductivity reflecting the no…
We propose a mechanism for destabilizing or stabilizing Bose-Einstein condensation (BEC) of interacting magnons in an antiferromagnet. We study how the interaction between magnons affects the magnon BEC in a two-sublattice antiferromagnet without and with an external magnetic field. We show that in the absence of the magnetic field the magnon BEC is destabilized by the attractive interband interaction, which is larger than the repulsive intraband interaction. We also show that in the presence of the magnetic field the magnon BEC is stabilized only if the magnetic field is large enough to make …
We demonstrate theoretically that the thermal Hall effect of magnons in collinear antiferromagnetic insulators is an indicator of magnetic and topological phase transitions in the magnon spectrum. The transversal heat current of magnons caused by a thermal gradient is calculated for an antiferromagnet on a honeycomb lattice. An applied magnetic field drives the system from the antiferromagnetic phase via a spin-flop phase into the field-polarized phase. Besides these magnetic phase transitions we find topological phase transitions within the spin-flop phase. Both types of transitions manifest …
We theoretically study the interaction of magnons, quanta of spin waves, and a domain wall in a one-dimensional easy-axis antiferromagnet in the presence of an external magnetic field applied along the easy axis. To this end, we begin by obtaining the exact solution for spin waves in the background of a domain wall magnetized by an external field. The finite magnetization inside the domain wall is shown to give rise to reflection of magnons scattering off the domain wall, deviating from the well-known result of reflection-free magnons in the absence of a magnetic field. For practical applicati…
We study gauge fields produced by gradients of the Dzyaloshinskii-Moriya interaction and propose a model of AFM topological insulator of magnons. In the long wavelength limit, the Landau levels induced by the inhomogeneous Dzyaloshinskii-Moriya interaction exhibit relativistic physics described by the Klein-Gordon equation. The spin Nernst response due to the formation of magnonic Landau levels is compared to similar topological responses in skyrmion and vortex-antivortex crystal phases of AFM insulators. Our studies show that AFM insulators exhibit rich physics associated with topological mag…
Excitation of coherent high-frequency magnons (quanta of spin waves) is critical to the development of high-speed magnonic devices. Here we computationally demonstrate the excitation of coherent sub-terahertz (THz) magnons in ferromagnetic (FM) and antiferromagnetic (AFM) thin films by a photoinduced picosecond acoustic pulse. Analytical calculations are also performed to reveal the magnon excitation mechanism. Through spin pumping and spin-charge conversion, these magnons can inject sub-THz charge current into an adjacent heavy-metal film which in turn emits electromagnetic (EM) waves. Using …
The recent emergence of 2D van der Waals magnets down to atomic layer thickness provides an exciting platform for exploring quantum magnetism and spintronics applications. The van der Waals nature stabilizes the long-range ferromagnetic order as a result of magnetic anisotropy. Furthermore, giant tunneling magnetoresistance and electrical control of magnetism have been reported. However, the potential of 2D van der Waals magnets for magnonics, magnon-based spintronics, has not been explored yet. Here, we report the experimental observation of long-distance magnon transport in quasi-twodimensio…
We investigate the role of domain walls in the ultrafast magnon dynamics of an antiferromagnetic NiO single crystal in a pump-probe experiment with variable pump photon energy. Analysing the amplitude of the energy-dependent photo-induced ultrafast spin dynamics, we detect a yet unreported coupling between the material's characteristic THz- and a GHz-magnon modes. We explain this unexpected coupling between two orthogonal eigenstates of the corresponding Hamiltonian by modelling the magneto-elastic interaction between spins in different domains. We find that such interaction, in the non-linear…
