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Topological magneto-elastic excitations in a two dimensional spin-nematic phase

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Abstract

Recent works [1,2] on spin-lattice coupling show that the hybridized magnon-phonon excitations can have non-zero Berry curvature and nontrivial band topology, despite the magnon and phonon systems individually being topologically trivial. In this work, we investigate the coupling between phonons and the nematic magnon degrees of freedom in spin-1 systems. We thoroughly explore the phase diagram of the square lattice bilinear-biquadratic spin-1 Heisenberg model coupled to phonons and external magnetic field, and discover a rich variety of topological phases with relatively high Chern numbers on the topological bands. In addition, we found that the magneto-elastic coupling leads to a robust power-law growth of thermal Hall conductivity (kxy/T) in the low temperature limit, which is a very distinct experimental signature of the phonon-magnon coupling despite kxy/T not being quantized.

Reference:

[1] Gyungchoon Go, et al. "Topological Magnon-Phonon Hybrid Excitations in Two-Dimensional Ferromagnets with Tunable Chern Numbers", Phys. Rev. Lett. 123, 237207 (2019).

[2] Shu Zhang, et al. "SU(3) Topology of Magnon-Phonon Hybridization in 2D Antiferromagnets", Phys. Rev. Lett. 124, 147204 (2020).

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Presenters

  • Shuyi Li

    Rice University, Department of Physics and Astronomy, Rice University

Authors

  • Shuyi Li

    Rice University, Department of Physics and Astronomy, Rice University

  • Yan Han

    Rice University, Department of Physics and Astronomy, Rice University, TX, USA, Department of Physics and Astronomy, Rice University

  • Andriy H Nevidomskyy

    Rice Univ, Rice University, Department of Physics and Astronomy, Rice University, Houston, Texas 77005, USA, Department of Physics and Astronomy, Rice University, TX, USA, Department of Physics and Astronomy, Rice University, Department of Physics & Astronomy, Rice University