Chiral magnons, the quanta of handed spin waves, transport spin angular momentum without energy loss due to Joule heating. The recently discovered altermagnets were proposed to host chiral magnons arising from a non-relativistic exchange mechanism, similar to that in ferromagnets but without net magnetization, offering a stray-field-free platform for efficient magnon spin-current manipulation. In this work, we directly observed chiral magnons in the altermagnetic prototype MnTe using polarized inelastic neutron scattering. Furthermore, the magnon chirality was found to be reversibly switched by magnetic-field control, establishing a robust foundation for functional altermagnetic magnonics.
@article{arxiv.2605.14124,
title = {Observation of Switchable Chiral Magnons in an Altermagnet},
author = {Zheyuan Liu and Hodaka Kikuchi and Zijun Wei and Shinichiro Asai and Mechthild Enderle and Ursula B. Hansen and Vasile O. Garlea and Manh D. Le and Gøran J. Nilsen and Igor A. Zaliznyak and Takatsugu Masuda},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2605.14124},
year = {2026}
}
Comments
7 pages, 3 figures. Accepted for publication in Phys. Rev. Lett. Supplemental Material is included only in the PRL version