No Arabic abstract
In two-dimensional (2D) insulating magnets, the thermal Hall effect of magnons is believed to be a consequence of topological magnon insulator with separated magnon bands and a well-defined Chern number. Due to broken time-reversal symmetry the thermal Hall effect vanishes in Dirac magnons. In this paper, we show that periodically driven semi-Dirac magnon in 2D insulating honeycomb ferromagnet results in a photoinduced Dirac magnon at the topological phase transition between a photoinduced topological and trivial magnon insulator. Remarkably, the photoinduced Dirac magnon and the photoinduced trivial magnon insulator possess a nonzero Berry curvature and exhibit a finite thermal Hall effect. These intriguing properties of periodically driven 2D insulating magnets originate from the bosonic nature of magnons. Hence, they are not expected to exist in 2D electronic Floquet systems.
We analyze the magnon excitations in pyrochlore iridates with all-in-all-out (AIAO) antiferromagnetic order, focusing on their topological features. We identify the magnetic point group symmetries that protect the nodal-line band crossings and triple-point degeneracies that dominate the Berry curvature. We find three distinct regimes of magnon band topology, as a function of the ratio of Dzyaloshinskii-Moriya (DM) interaction to the antiferromagnetic exchange. We show how the thermal Hall response provides a unique probe of the topological magnon band structure in AIAO systems.
We study periodically driven pure Kitaev model and ferromagnetic phase of the Kitaev-Heisenberg model on the honeycomb lattice by off-resonant linearly and circularly-polarized lights at zero magnetic field. Using a combination of linear spin wave and Floquet theories, we show that the effective time-independent Hamiltonians in the off-resonant regime map onto the corresponding anisotropic static spin model, plus a tunable photoinduced magnetic field along the $[111]$ direction, which precipitates Floquet topological magnons and chiral magnon edge modes. They are tunable by the light amplitude and polarization. Similarly, we show that the thermal Hall effect induced by the Berry curvature of the Floquet topological magnons can also be tuned by the laser field. Our results pave the way for ultrafast manipulation of topological magnons in irradiated Kitaev magnets, and could play a pivotal role in the investigation of ultrafast magnon spin current generation in Kitaev materials.
Thermal transport in topologically-ordered phases of matter provides valuable insights as it can detect the charge-neutral quasiparticles that would not directly couple to electromagnetic probes. An important example is edge heat transport of Majorana fermions in a chiral spin liquid, which leads to a half-quantized thermal Hall conductivity. This signature is precisely what has recently been measured in $alpha$-RuCl$_3$ under external magnetic fields. The plateau-like behavior of the half-quantized thermal Hall conductivity as a function of external magnetic field, and the peculiar sign change depending on the magnetic field orientation, has been proposed as strong evidence for the non-Abelian Kitaev spin liquid. Alternatively, for in-plane magnetic fields, it was theoretically shown that such a sign structure can also arise from topological magnons in the field-polarized state. In this work, we investigate the full implications of topological magnons as heat carriers on thermal transport measurements. We first prove analytically that for any commensurate order with a finite magnetic unit cell, reversing the field direction leads to a sign change in the magnon thermal Hall conductivity in two-dimensional systems. We verify this proof numerically with nontrivial magnetic orders as well as the field-polarized state in Kitaev magnets subjected to an in-plane field. In the case of a tilted magnetic field, whereby there exist both finite in-plane and out-of-plane field components, we find that the plateau-like behavior of the thermal Hall conductivity and the sign change upon reversing the in-plane component of the magnetic field arise in the partially-polarized state, as long as the in-plane field contribution to the Zeeman energy is significant. While these results are consistent with the experimental observations, we comment on other aspects requiring investigation in future studies.
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 themselves in prominent and distinguishing features in the thermal conductivities; depending on the temperature, the conductivity changes by several orders of magnitude, providing a tool to discern experimentally the two types of phase transitions. We include numerical results for the van der Waals magnet MnPS$_3$.
Via angular Shubnikov-de Hass (SdH) quantum oscillations measurements, we determine the Fermi surface topology of NbAs, a Weyl semimetal candidate. The SdH oscillations consist of two frequencies, corresponding to two Fermi surface extrema: 20.8 T ($alpha$-pocket) and 15.6 T ($beta$-pocket). The analysis, including a Landau fan plot, shows that the $beta$-pocket has a Berry phase of $pi$ and a small effective mass $sim$0.033 $m_0$, indicative of a nontrivial topology in momentum space; whereas the $alpha$-pocket has a trivial Berry phase of 0 and a heavier effective mass $sim$0.066 $m_0$. From the effective mass and the $beta$-pocket frequency we determine that the Weyl node is 110.5 meV from the chemical potential. A novel electron-hole compensation effect is discussed in this system, and its impact on magneto-transport properties is addressed. The difference between NbAs and other monopnictide Weyl semimetals is also discussed.