On-line SPICE-SPIN+X Seminars

On-line Seminar: 28.07.2021 - 15:00 German Time

Interacting and higher-order topological spin excitations

Alexander Mook, University of Basel

Quantum condensed matter admits topological collective excitations above a trivial ground state, an example being Chern insulators formed by Dirac bosons with a gap at finite energies. However, in contrast to electrons, there is no particle-number conservation law for collective excitations. This gives rise to particle number-nonconserving many-body interactions the influence of which on single-particle topology is an open issue of fundamental interest in the field of topological quantum materials.
Herein, I concentrate on magnons that are the elementary spin excitations of ferromagnets. A ferromagnet with Chern-insulating behavior of magnons exhibits a magnonic spectral gap hosting topologically protected chiral edge modes that unidirectionally revolve the sample. Since these chiral edge magnons may serve as directed information highways in next-generation technologies with ultralow energy consumption, a fundamental understanding of their formation and stability is at the very core of the topological magnonics paradigm.
I present topological magnons in three different setups: (i) skyrmion crystals [1], (ii) saturated chiral magnets [2], and (iii) stacks of honeycomb-lattice van der Waals magnets [3]. These setups respectively serve as platforms to study (i) quantum damping due to spontaneous quasiparticle decay, (ii) interaction-stabilized topological gaps in the magnon spectrum, and (iii) second-order topology in three-dimensional samples that admit chiral states along their hinges, where facets intersect.

[1] Alexander Mook, Jelena Klinovaja, and Daniel Loss, "Quantum damping of skyrmion crystal eigenmodes due to spontaneous quasiparticle decay," Phys. Rev. Research 2, 033491 (2020)
[2] Alexander Mook, Kirill Plekhanov, Jelena Klinovaja, and Daniel Loss, "Interaction-Stabilized Topological Magnon Insulator in Ferromagnets," Phys. Rev. X 11, 021061 (2021)
[3] Alexander Mook, Sebastián Díaz, Jelena Klinovaja, and Daniel Loss, "Chiral Hinge Magnons in Second-Order Topological Magnon Insulators," PRB (in press), arXiv:2010.04142 (2020)

 

PDF file of the talk available here