When a magnon passes through two-dimensional magnetic textures, it will experience a fictitious magnetic field originating from the $3\times 3$ skew-symmetric gauge fields. To date, only one of the three independent components of the gauge fields has been found to play a role in generating the fictitious magnetic field while the rest two are perfectly hidden. In this work, we show that they are concealed in the nonlinear magnon transport in magnetic textures. Without loss of generality, we theoretically study the nonlinear magnon-skyrmion interaction in antiferromagnets. By analyzing the scattering features of three-magnon processes between the circularly-polarized incident magnon and breathing skyrmion, we predict a giant Hall angle of both the confluence and splitting modes. Furthermore, we find that the Hall angle reverses its sign when one switches the handedness of the incident magnons. We dub it nonlinear topological magnon spin Hall effect. Our findings are deeply rooted in the bosonic nature of magnons that the particle number is not conserved, which has no counterpart in low-energy fermionic systems, and may open the door for probing gauge fields by nonlinear means.
We investigate magnetization dynamics in a spin-Hall oscillator using a direct current measurement as well as conventional microwave spectrum analysis. When the current applies an anti-damping spin-transfer torque, we observe a change in resistance which we ascribe to the excitation of incoherent exchange magnons. A simple model is developed based on the reduction of the effective saturation magnetization, quantitatively explaining the data. The observed phenomena highlight the importance of exchange magnons on the operation of spin-Hall oscillators.
Due to the Berry curvature in momentum space, the magnon wavepacket undergoes two types of orbital motions in analogy with the electron system: the self-rotation motion and a motion along the boundary of the sample (edge current). The magnon edge current causes the thermal Hall effect, and these orbital motions give corrections to the thermal transport coefficients. We also apply our theory to the magnetostatic spin wave in a thin-film ferromagnet, and derive expression for the Berry curvature.
Twistronics is currently one of the most active research fields in condensed matter physics, following the discovery of correlated insulating and superconducting phases in twisted bilayer graphene (tBLG). Here, we present a magnonic analogue of tBLG. We study magnons in twisted ferromagnetic bilayers (tFBL), including exchange and Dzyaloshinskii-Moriya interactions (DMI). For negligible DMI, tFBL presents discrete magnon magic angles and flat moiré minibands analogous to tBLG. The DMI, however, changes the picture and renders the system much more exotic. The DMI in tFBL induces a rich topologi…
We theoretically study the thermal Hall effect by magnons in skyrmion crystal phases of ferrimagnets in the vicinity of the angular momentum compensation point (CP). To this end, we start by deriving the equation of motion for magnons in the background of an arbitrary equilibrium spin texture, which gives rise to the fictitious electromagnetic field for magnons. As the net spin density varies, the resultant equation of motion interpolates between the relativistic Klein-Gordon equation at CP and the nonrelativistic Schr{ö}dinger-like equation away from it. In skyrmion crystal phases, the right-…
Magnon spin Hall systems could hardly show experimentally observable particle and thermal transport phenomena intrinsically due to the spin cancellation. Here we demonstrated that the magnon spin Hall systems can exhibit magnon Nernst effect and thermal Hall effect under external magnetic field by considering two typical systems, i.e. the antiferromagnetically (AFM) coupled bilayer honeycomb ferromagnets and monolayer collinear honeycomb antiferromagnet. The both systems experience magnetic phase transitions from AFM phase to a field-polarized phase via a spin-flop (SF) phase or directly. In b…
In an easy-plane antiferromagnet with the Dzyaloshinskii-Moriya interaction (DMI), magnons are subject to an effective spin-momentum locking. An in-plane temperature gradient can generate interfacial accumulation of magnons with a specified polarization, realizing the magnon thermal Edelstein effect. We theoretically investigate the injection and detection of this thermally-driven spin polarization in an adjacent heavy metal with strong spin Hall effect. We find that the inverse spin Hall voltage depends monotonically on both temperature and the DMI but non-monotonically on the hard-axis aniso…
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…
Low-energy magnon bands in a two-dimensional spin ice model become integer quantum magnon Hall bands. By calculating the localization length and the two-terminal conductance of magnon transport, we show that the magnon bands with disorders undergo a quantum phase transition from an integer quantum magnon Hall regime to a conventional magnon localized regime. Finite size scaling analysis as well as a critical conductance distribution shows that the quantum critical point belongs to the same universality class as that in the quantum Hall transition. We characterize thermal magnon Hall conductivi…
Topological magnon modes are expected to be useful for novel applications such as robust information propagation, since they are immune to backscattering and robust against disorder. Although there are several of theoretical proposals for topological magnon modes and growing experimental efforts for realizing them by now, it is still desirable to add complementary insights on this important phenomenon. Here, we propose a new scheme to achieve topological magnon where only nearest-neighbour exchange couplings on honeycomb lattice are necessary. In both ferromagnets and antiferromagnets, tuning …
We perform electronic measurements of unidirectional spin Hall magnetoresistance (USMR) in a Permalloy/Pt bilayer, in conjunction with magneto-optical Brillouin light spectroscopy of spin current-driven magnon population. We show that the current dependence of USMR closely follows the dipolar magnon density, and that both dependencies exhibit the same scaling over a large temperature range of 80-400 K. These findings demonstrate a close relationship between spin current-driven magnon generation and USMR, and indicate that the latter is likely dominated by the dipolar magnons.
Magnon Thermal Hall Effect Induced By Symmetric Exchange Interaction
CAS Key Laboratory of Strongly-Coupled Quantum Matter Physics（强耦合量子物质物理中国科学院重点实验室）；Department of Physics, University of Science and Technology of China（中国科学技术大学物理学院）；Hefei National Laboratory, University of Science and Technology of China（中国科学技术大学合肥国家实验室）
We propose a new mechanism for the thermal Hall effect in exchange spin-wave systems, which is induced by the magnon-phonon interaction. Using symmetry arguments, we first show that this effect is quite general, and exists whenever the mirror symmetry in the direction of the magnetization is broken. We then demonstrate our result in a collinear ferromagnet on a square lattice, with perpendicular easy-axis anisotropy and Dzyaloshinskii-Moriya interaction from mirror symmetry breaking. We show that the thermal Hall conductivity is controlled by the resonant contribution from the anti-crossing po…
We analyze the coupling of elastic lattice deformations to the magnon degrees of freedom of magnon Dirac materials. For a Honeycomb ferromagnet we find that, as it happens in the case of graphene, elastic gauge fields appear coupled to the magnon pseudospinors. For deformations that induce constant pseudomagnetic fields, the spectrum around the Dirac nodes splits into pseudoLandau levels. We show that when a Dzyaloshinskii-Moriya interaction is considered, a topological gap opens in the system and a Chern-Simons effective action for the elastic degrees of freedom is generated. Such a term enco…
Recent experiments have established a qualitative difference between the magnetization temperature-dependences $M(T)$ of quantum Hall ferromagnets at integer and fractional filling factors. We explain this difference in terms of the relative energies of collective magnon and particle-hole excitations in the two cases. Analytic calculations for hard-core model systems are used to demonstrate that, in the fractional case, interactions suppress the magnetization at finite temperatures and that particle-hole excitations rather than long-wavelength magnons control $M(T)$ at low $T$.
A magnon Nernst effect, an antiferromagnetic analogue of the magnon Hall effect in ferromagnetic insulators, has been studied experimentally for a layered antiferromagnetic insulator MnPS3 in contact with two Pt strips. Thermoelectric voltage in the Pt strips grown on MnPS3 single crystals exhibits non-monotonic temperature dependence at low temperatures, which cannot be explained by electronic origins in Pt but can be ascribed to the inverse spin Hall voltage induced by a magnon Nernst effect. Control of antiferromagnetic domains in the MnPS3 crystal by magnetoelectric cooling is found to mod…
In this paper, we present a simple model of a three-dimensional insulating magnetic structure which represents a magnonic analog of the layered electronic system described in [Phys. Rev. Lett. {\bf 107}, 127205 (2011)]. In particular, our model realizes Weyl magnons as well as surface states with a Dirac spectrum. In this model, the Dzyaloshinskii-Moriya interaction is responsible for the separation of opposite Weyl points in momentum space. We calculate the intrinsic (due to the Berry curvature) transport properties of Weyl and so-called anomalous Hall effect (AHE) magnons. The results are co…
Two-dimensional magnetic insulators can be promising hosts for topological magnons. In this study, we show that ABC-stacked honeycomb lattice multilayers with alternating Dzyaloshinskii-Moriya interaction (DMI) reveal a rich topological magnon phase diagram. Based on our bandstructure and Berry curvature calculations, we demonstrate jumps in the thermal Hall behavior that corroborate with topological phase transitions triggered by adjusting the DMI and interlayer coupling. We connect the phase diagram of generic multilayers to a bilayer and a trilayer system. We find an even-odd effect amongst…
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…
Electrical resistivities can be different for charge currents travelling parallel or perpendicular to the magnetization in magnetically ordered conductors or semiconductors, resulting in the well-known planar Hall effect and anisotropic magnetoresistance. Here, we study the analogous anisotropic magnetotransport behavior for magnons in a magnetic insulator Y$_{3}$Fe$_{5}$O$_{12}$. Electrical and thermal magnon injection, and electrical detection methods are used at room temperature with transverse and longitudinal geometries to measure the magnon planar Hall effect and anisotropic magnetoresis…
In the ferromagnetic insulator with Dzyaloshinskii-Moriya interaction, we theoretically predict and numerically verify a topological magnon insulator, where the charge-free magnon is topologically protected to transport along the edge while it is insulating in the bulk. Within the bulk band gaps, edge states form a connected loop as a $4π$- or $8π$-period Möbius strip in the wave vector space. As a consequence, the chiral energy current traveling along the corresponding edge is topologically protected from defects or disorders. Using the nonequilibrium Green's function method, we demonstrate t…
We develop a model for the magnonic contribution to the unidirectional spin Hall magnetoresistance (USMR) of heavy metal/ferromagnetic insulator bilayer films. We show that diffusive transport of Holstein-Primakoff magnons leads to an accumulation of spin near the bilayer interface, giving rise to a magnoresistance which is not invariant under inversion of the current direction. Unlike the electronic contribution described by Zhang and Vignale [Phys. Rev. B 94, 140411 (2016)], which requires an electrically conductive ferromagnet, the magnonic contribution can occur in ferromagnetic insulators…
We derive the anomalous Hall contributions arising from dipolar interactions to diffusive spin transport in magnetic insulators. Magnons, the carriers of angular momentum in these systems, are shown to have a non-zero Berry curvature, resulting in a measurable Hall effect. For yttrium iron garnet (YIG) thin films we calculate both the anomalous and magnon spin conductivities. We show that for a magnetic field perpendicular to the film the anomalous Hall conductivity is finite. This results in a non-zero Hall signal, which can be measured experimentally using Permalloy strips arranged like a Ha…
Spin-Hall-Like Magnon Transport in a Synthetic Antiferromagnetic Skyrmion Lattice
Dongguan Institute of Materials Science and Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院东莞材料基因高等理工研究院）；Songshan Lake Materials Laboratory（松山湖材料实验室）；Shenzhen Technology University（深圳技术大学）；Hunan University（湖南大学）；Central South University（中南大学）
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.
We present a quantum Hall effect of magnons in two-dimensional clean insulating magnets at finite temperature. Through the Aharonov-Casher effect, a magnon moving in an electric field acquires a geometric phase and forms Landau levels in an electric field gradient of sawtooth form. At low temperatures, the lowest energy band being almost flat carries a Chern number associated with a Berry curvature. Appropriately defining the thermal conductance for bosons, we find that the magnon Hall conductances get quantized and show a universal thermomagnetic behavior, i.e., are independent of materials, …
Motivated by recent experimental work, we consider spin transport between a normal metal and a gapped quantum paramagnet. We model the latter as the magnonic Mott-insulating phase of an easy-plane ferromagnetic insulator. We evaluate the spin current mediated by the interface exchange coupling between the ferromagnet and the adjacent normal metal. For the strongly interacting magnons that we consider, this spin current gives rise to a spin Hall magnetoresistance that strongly depends on the magnitude of the magnetic field, rather than its direction. This Letter may motivate electrical detectio…
The Righi-Leduc effect refers to the thermal analogue of the Hall effect, for which the electric current is replaced by the heat current and the electric field by the temperature gradient. In both cases, the magnetic field generates a transverse force that deviates the carriers (electron, phonon, magnon) in the direction perpendicular to the current. In a ferromagnet, the magnetization plays the role of the magnetic field, and the corresponding effect is called anomalous Hall effect. Furthermore, a second transverse contribution due to the anisotropy, the planar Hall effect, is superimposed to…
We present theoretically the thermal Hall effect of magnons in a ferromagnetic lattice with a Kekulé-O coupling (KOC) modulation and a Dzyaloshinskii-Moriya interaction (DMI). Through a strain-based mechanism for inducing the KOC modulation, we identify four topological phases in terms of the KOC parameter and DMI strength. We calculate the thermal magnon Hall conductivity ${κ^{xy}}$ at low temperature in each of these phases. We predict an unconventional conductivity due to a non-zero Berry curvature emerging from band proximity effects in the topologically trivial phase. We find sign changes…
Magnons enable transferring a magnetic moment or spin over macroscopic distance. In quantum Hall ferromagnet, it has been predicted in the early 90s that spin and charges are entangled, meaning that any change of the spin texture modifies the charge distribution. As a direct consequence of this entanglement, magnons carry an electric dipole moment. Here we report the first evidence of the existence of this electric dipole moment in a graphene quantum Hall ferromagnet using a Mach-Zehnder interferometer as a quantum sensor. By propagating towards the interferometer through an insulating bulk, t…
Magnonic excitations in the two-dimensional (2D) van der Waals (vdW) ferromagnet CrI3 are studied. We find that bulk magnons exhibit a non-trivial topological band structure without the need for Dzyaloshinskii-Moriya (DM) interaction. This is shown in vdW heterostructures, consisting of single-layer CrI3 on top of different 2D materials as MoTe2, HfS2 and WSe2. We find numerically that the proposed substrates modify substantially the out-of-plane magnetic anisotropy on each sublattice of the CrI3 subsystem. The induced staggered anisotropy, combined with a proper band inversion, leads to the o…
Topologically protected magnon surface states are highly desirable as an ideal platform to engineer low-dissipation spintronics devices. However, theoretical prediction of topological magnons in strongly correlated materials proves to be challenging because the ab initio density functional theory calculations fail to reliably predict magnetic interactions in correlated materials. Here, we present a symmetry-based approach, which predicts topological magnons in magnetically ordered crystals, upon applying external perturbations such as magnetic/electric fields and/or mechanical strains. We appl…
We study the spin Hall magnetoresistance (SMR) and the magnon spin transport (MST) in Pt/Y3Fe5O12(YIG)-based devices with intentionally modified interfaces. Our measurements show that the surface treatment of the YIG film results in a slight enhancement of the spin-mixing conductance and an extraordinary increase in the efficiency of the spin-to-magnon excitations at room temperature. The surface of the YIG film develops a surface magnetic frustration at low temperatures, causing a sign change of the SMR and a dramatic suppression of the MST. Our results evidence that SMR and MST could be used…
We theoretically study the intrinsic thermal Hall and spin Nernst effect in collinear ferrimagnets on a honeycomb lattice with broken inversion symmetry. The broken inversion symmetry allows in-plane Dzyaloshinskii-Moriya interaction between the nearest neighbors, which does not affect the magnon spectrum in the linear spin wave theory. However, the Dzyaloshinskii-Moriya interaction can induce large Berry curvature in the magnetoelastic excitation spectrum through the magnon-phonon interaction to produce thermal Hall current. Furthermore, we find that the magnetoelastic excitations transport s…
The non-trivial magnon band topology and its consequent responses have been extensively studied in two-dimensional magnetisms. However, the triangular lattice antiferromagnet (TLAF), the best-known frustrated two-dimensional magnet, has received less attention than the closely related Kagome system, because of the spin-chirality cancellation in the umbrella ground state of the undistorted TLAF. In this work, we study the band topology and the thermal Hall effect (THE) of the TLAF with (anti-)trimerization distortion under the external perpendicular magnetic field using the linearized spin wave…
We conducted a systematic angular dependence study of nonlinear magnetoresistance in NiFe/Pt bilayers at variable temperature and field using the Wheatstone bridge method. We successfully disentangled magnon magnetoresistance from other types of magnetoresistances based on their different temperature and field dependences. Both the spin Hall/anisotropic and magnon magnetoresistances contain sine phi and sine 3 phi components with phi the angle between current and magnetization, but they exhibit different field and temperature dependence. The competition between different types of magnetoresist…
Fe3GeTe2 is a 2-dimensional van der Waals material exhibiting itinerant ferromagnetism upto 230 K. Here, we study aspects of scattering mechanism in Fe3Ge2Te2 single crystals via resistivity, magneto-transport and Hall effect measurements. The quadratic temperature dependence of electrical resistivity below the Curie temperature hints towards the dominance of electron-magnon scattering. A non-saturating positive magnetoresistance (MR) is observed at low temperatures when the magnetic field is applied parallel to the sample plane. The linear negative MR at high fields for T < TC corroborates to…
We propose a magnon realization of 3D topological insulator in the AIII (chiral symmetry) topological class. The topological magnon gap opens due to the presence of Dzyaloshinskii-Moriya interactions. The existence of the topological invariant is established by calculating the bulk winding number of the system. Within our model, the surface magnon Dirac cone is protected by the sublattice chiral symmetry. By analyzing the magnon surface modes, we confirm that the backscattering is prohibited. By weakly breaking the chiral symmetry, we observe the magnon Hall response on the surface due to open…
The magnon transport driven by thermal gradient in a perpendicularly magnetized honeycomb lattice is studied. The system with the nearest-neighbor pseudodipolar interaction and the next-nearest-neighbor Dzyaloshinskii-Moriya interaction (DMI) has various topologically nontrivial phases. When an in-plane thermal gradient is applied, a transverse in-plane magnon current is generated. This phenomenon is termed as the anomalous magnon Nernst effect that closely resembles the anomalous Nernst effect for an electronic system. The anomalous magnon Nernst coefficient and its sign are determined by the…
We propose a definition of a ${\mathbb Z}_2$ topological invariant for magnon spin Hall systems which are the bosonic analog of two-dimensional topological insulators in class AII. The existence of "Kramers pairs" in these systems is guaranteed by pseudo-time-reversal symmetry which is the same as time-reversal symmetry up to some unitary transformation. The ${\mathbb Z}_2$ index of each Kramers pair of bands is expressed in terms of the bosonic counterparts of the Berry connection and curvature. We construct explicit examples of magnon spin Hall systems and demonstrate that our ${\mathbb Z}_2…
