English

Topological magnons in a non-coplanar magnetic order on the triangular lattice

Strongly Correlated Electrons 2024-06-04 v3 Materials Science Other Condensed Matter

Abstract

The bond-dependent Kitaev interaction KK is familiar in the effective spin model of transition metal compounds with octahedral ligands. In this work, we find a peculiar non-coplanar magnetic order can be formed with the help of KK and next-nearest neighbor Heisenberg coupling J2J_2 on the triangular lattice. It can be seen as a miniature version of skyrmion crystal, since it has nine spins and an integer topological number in a magnetic unit cell. The magnon excitations in such an order are studied by the linear spin-wave theory. Of note is that the change in the relative size of J2J_2 and KK produces topological magnon phase transitions although the topological number remains unchanged. We also calculated the experimentally observable thermal Hall conductivity, and found that the signs of thermal Hall conductivity will change with topological phase transitions or temperature changes in certain regions.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2401.12505,
  title  = {Topological magnons in a non-coplanar magnetic order on the triangular lattice},
  author = {Linli Bai and Ken Chen},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2401.12505},
  year   = {2024}
}