We investigate the spin excitation spectra in chiral and polar magnets by the linear spin-wave theory for an effective spin model with symmetric and antisymmetric long-range interactions. In one dimension, we obtain the analytic form of the dynamical
spin structure factor for proper-screw and cycloidal helical spin states with uniform twists, which shows a gapless mode with strong intensity at the helical wave number. When introducing spin anisotropy in the symmetric interactions, we numerically show that the stable spin spirals become elliptically anisotropic with nonuniform twists and the spin excitation is gapped. In higher dimensions, we find that similar anisotropy stabilizes multiple-$Q$ spin states, such as vortex crystals and hedgehog lattices. We show that the anisotropy in these states manifests itself in the dynamical spin structure factor: a strong intensity in the transverse components to the wave number appears only when the helical wave vector and the corresponding easy axis are perpendicular to each other. Our findings could be useful not only to identify the spin structure but also to deduce the stabilization mechanism by inelastic neutron scattering measurements.
We propose a general framework for finding the ground state of many-body fermionic systems by using feed-forward neural networks. The anticommutation relation for fermions is usually implemented to a variational wave function by the Slater determinan
t (or Pfaffian), which is a computational bottleneck because of the numerical cost of $O(N^3)$ for $N$ particles. We bypass this bottleneck by explicitly calculating the sign changes associated with particle exchanges in real space and using fully connected neural networks for optimizing the rest parts of the wave function. This reduces the computational cost to $O(N^2)$ or less. We show that the accuracy of the approximation can be improved by optimizing the variance of the energy simultaneously with the energy itself. We also find that a reweighting method in Monte Carlo sampling can stabilize the calculation. These improvements can be applied to other approaches based on variational Monte Carlo methods. Moreover, we show that the accuracy can be further improved by using the symmetry of the system, the representative states, and an additional neural network implementing a generalized Gutzwiller-Jastrow factor. We demonstrate the efficiency of the method by applying it to a two-dimensional Hubbard model.
Chiral magnets, which break both spatial inversion and time reversal symmetries, carry a potential for quadratic optical responses. Despite the possibility of enhanced and controlled responses through the magnetic degree of freedom, the systematic un
derstanding remains yet to be developed. We here study nonlinear optical responses in a prototypical chiral magnetic state with a one-dimensional conical order by using the second-order response theory. We show that the photovoltaic effect and the second harmonic generation are induced by asymmetric modulation of the electronic band structure under the conical magnetic order, and the coefficients, including the sign, change drastically depending on the frequency of incident lights, the external magnetic field, and the strength of spin-charge coupling. We find that both effects can be enormously large compared to those in the conventional nonmagnetic materials. Our results would pave the way for next-generation optical electronic devices, such as unconventional solar cells and optical sensors, based on chiral magnets.
The quantum Monte Carlo method on asymptotic Lefschetz thimbles is a numerical algorithm devised specifically for alleviation of the sign problem appearing in the simulations of quantum many-body systems. In this method, the sign problem is alleviate
d by shifting the integration domain for the auxiliary fields, appearing for example in the conventional determinant quantum Monte Carlo method, from real space to an appropriate manifold in complex space. Here we extend this method to quantum spin models with generic two-spin interactions, by using the Hubbard-Stratonovich transformation to decouple the exchange interactions and the Popov-Fedotov transformation to map the quantum spins to complex fermions. As a demonstration, we apply the method to the Kitaev model in a magnetic field whose ground state is predicted to deliver a topological quantum spin liquid with non-Abelian anyonic excitations. To illustrate how the sign problem is alleviated in this method, we visualize the asymptotic Lefschetz thimbles in complex space, together with the saddle points and the zeros of the fermion determinant. We benchmark our method in the low-temperature region in a magnetic field and show that the sign of the action is recovered considerably and unbiased numerical results are obtained with sufficient precision.
The Kitaev model realizes a quantum spin liquid where the spin excitations are fractionalized into itinerant Majorana fermions and localized $mathbb{Z}_2$ vortices. Quantum entanglement between the fractional excitations can be utilized for decoheren
ce-free topological quantum computation. Of particular interest is the anyonic statistics realized by braiding the vortex excitations under a magnetic field. Despite the promising potential, the practical methodology for creation and control of the vortex excitations remains elusive thus far. Here we theoretically propose how one can create and move the vortices in the Kitaev spin liquid. We find that the vortices are induced by a local modulation of the exchange interaction; especially, the local Dzyaloshinskii-Moriya (symmetric off-diagonal) interaction can create vortices most efficiently in the (anti)ferromagnetic Kitaev model, as it effectively flips the sign of the Kitaev interaction. We test this idea by performing the {it ab initio} calculation for a candidate material $alpha$-RuCl$_3$ through the manipulation of the ligand positions that breaks the inversion symmetry and induces the local Dzyaloshinskii-Moriya interaction. We also demonstrate a braiding of vortices by adiabatically and successively changing the local bond modulations.
Recent studies revealed that the electric multipole moments of insulators result in fractional electric charges localized to the hinges and corners of the sample. We here explore the magnetic analog of this relation. We show that a collinear antiferr
omagnet with spin $S$ defined on a $d$-dimensional cubic lattice features fractionally quantized magnetization $M_{text{c}}^z=S/2^d$ at the corners. We find that the quantization is robust even in the presence of gapless excitations originating from the spontaneous formation of the Neel order, although the localization length diverges, suggesting a power-law localization of the corner magnetization. When the spin rotational symmetry about the $z$ axis is explicitly broken, the corner magnetization is no longer sharply quantized. Even in this case, we numerically find that the deviation from the quantized value is negligibly small based on quantum Monte Carlo simulations.
Superpositions of spin helices can yield topological spin textures, such as two-dimensional vortices and skyrmions, and three-dimensional hedgehogs. Their topological nature and spatial dimensionality depend on the number and relative directions of t
he constituent helices. This allows mutual transformation between the topological spin textures by controlling the spatial anisotropy. Here we theoretically study the effect of anisotropy in the magnetic interactions for an effective spin model for chiral magnetic metals. By variational calculations for both cases with triple and quadruple superpositions, we find that the hedgehog lattices, which are stable in the isotropic case, are deformed by the anisotropy, and eventually changed into other spin textures with reduced dimension, such as helices and vortices. We also clarify the changes of topological properties by tracing the real-space positions of magnetic monopoles and antimonopoles as well as the emergent magnetic field generated by the noncoplanar spin textures. Our results suggest possible control of the topological spin textures, e.g., by uniaxial pressure and chemical substitution in chiral materials.
A superposition of spin helices can yield topological spin textures, such as skyrmion and hedgehog lattices. Based on the analogy with the moire in optics, we study the magnetic and topological properties of such superpositions in a comprehensive way
by modulating the interference pattern continuously. We find that the control of the angles between the superposed helices and the net magnetization yields successive topological transitions associated with pair annihilation of hedgehogs and antihedgehogs. Accordingly, emergent electromagnetic fields, magnetic monopoles and antimonopoles, and Dirac strings arising from the noncoplanar spin textures show systematic evolution. In addition, we also show how the system undergoes the magnetic transitions with dimensional reduction from the three-dimensional hedgehog lattice to a two-dimensional skyrmion lattice or a one-dimensional conical state. The results indicate that the concept of spin moir{e} provides an efficient way of engineering the emergent electromagnetism and topological nature in magnets.
Universality is a powerful concept that arises from the divergence of a characteristic length scale. For condensed matter systems, this length scale is typically the correlation length, which diverges at critical points separating two different phase
s. Few-particle systems exhibit a simpler form of universality when the $s$-wave scattering length diverges. A prominent example of universal phenomena is the emergence of an infinite tower of three-body bound states obeying discrete scale invariance, known as the Efimov effect, which has been subject to extensive research in chemical, atomic, nuclear and particle physics. In principle, these universal phenomena can also emerge in the excitation spectrum of condensed matter systems, such as quantum magnets~[Y. Nishida, Y. Kato, and C. Batista, Nat. Phys. 9, 93 (2013)]. However, the limited tunability of the effective inter-particle interaction relative to the kinetic energy has precluded so far their observation. Here we demonstrate that a high degree of magnetic-field-induced tunability can also be achieved in quantum magnets with strong spin-orbit coupling: a two-magnon resonance condition can be achieved in Yb$_2$Ti$_2$O$_7$ with a field of $sim$ 13~T along the [110] direction, which leads to the formation of Efimov states in the three-magnon spectrum of this material. Raman scattering experiments can reveal the field-induced two-magnon resonance, as well as the Efimov three-magnon bound states that emerge near the resonance condition.
We theoretically study magnetoelectric effects in a heterostructure of a generic band insulator and a ferromagnet. In contrast to the kinetic magnetoelectric effect in metals, referred to as the Edelstein effect or the inverse spin galvanic effect, o
ur mechanism relies on virtual interband transitions between the valence and conduction bands and therefore immune to disorder or impurity scattering. By calculating electric field-induced magnetization by the linear response theory, we reveal that the magnetoelectric effect shows up without specific parameter choices. The magnetoelectric effect qualitatively varies by changing the direction of the magnetic moment in the ferromagnet: the response is diagonal for the out-of-plane moment, whereas it is off-diagonal for the inplane moment. We also find out that in optical frequencies, the magnetoelectric signal can be drastically enhanced via interband resonant excitations. Finally, we estimate the magnitude of the magnetoelectric effect for a hybrid halide perovskite semiconductor as an example of the band insulator and compare it with other magnetoelectric materials. We underscore that our mechanism is quite general and widely expectable, only requiring the Rashba spin-orbit coupling and exchange coupling. Our result could potentially offer a promising method of Joule heating-free electric manipulation of magnetic moments in spintronic devices.
