New aspects of magnetoelectric responses in chiral antiferromagnets

Antiferromagnets have always been overshadowed by ferromagnets in real-life applications based on magnetism or spintronics. This is primarily due to that antiferromagnet order parameters, in contrast to the ferromagnetic magnetization, are only weakly coupled to magnetic fields, and are hence difficult, in conventional view, to be manipulated. I will discuss several recent theoretical and experimental developments that counter this conventional wisdom, in a class of antiferromagnets that have stable noncollinear magnetic order. I will first explain a theory for the time-reversal-symmetry-breaking counterparts of the conventional SHE and ISHE in the noncollinear antiferromagnet Mn3Sn, which are named as the magnetic spin Hall effect (MSHE) and the magnetic inverse spin Hall effect (MISHE), respectively [1]. I will then discuss the concept of spin density polarization, and how to use it to describe spin-Hall effects in a magnetic insulator as bulk effects, without using the spin current language [2]. I will finally present an exploration on the nontrivial orbital coupling between chiral antiferromagnets and external magnetic fields [3,4], and the potential detection of the elusive itinerant orbital magnetization by magnetic neutron scattering.

[1] M. Kimata, H. Chen, et al. Nature 565, 627 (2019).
[2] H. Chen, Q. Niu, and A. H. MacDonald, arXiv:1803.01294
[3] H. Chen et al., PRB 101, 104418 (2020).
[4] X. Li, A. H. MacDonald, and H. Chen, arXiv:1902.10650