English

Phonon Magnetic Moment from Electronic Topological Magnetization

Mesoscale and Nanoscale Physics 2021-11-10 v2 Materials Science

Abstract

The traditional theory of magnetic moments for chiral phonons is based on the picture of the circular motion of the Born effective charge, typically yielding a small fractional value of the nuclear magneton. Here we investigate the adiabatic evolution of electronic states induced by lattice vibration of a chiral phonon and obtain an electronic orbital magnetization in the form of a topological second Chern form. We find that the traditional theory needs to be refined by introducing a k\bm{k} resolved Born effective charge, and identify another contribution from the phonon-modified electronic energy together with the momentum-space Berry curvature. The second Chern form can diverge when there is a Yang's monopole near the parameter space of interest as illustrated by considering a phonon at the Brillouin zone corner in a gaped graphene model. We also find large magnetic moments for the optical phonon in bulk topological materials where non-topological contribution is also important. The magnetic moment experiences a sign change when the band inversion happens.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2103.05786,
  title  = {Phonon Magnetic Moment from Electronic Topological Magnetization},
  author = {Yafei Ren and Cong Xiao and Daniyar Saparov and Qian Niu},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2103.05786},
  year   = {2021}
}

Comments

5 pages, 3 figs, comments are welcome

R2 v1 2026-06-23T23:56:32.285Z