SciPost Submission Page
Light-induced topological magnons in two-dimensional van der Waals magnets
by Emil Viñas Boström, Martin Claassen, James W. McIver, Gregor Jotzu, Angel Rubio, Michael A. Sentef
This Submission thread is now published as
Submission summary
| Authors (as registered SciPost users): | Michael Sentef · Emil Vinas Boström |
| Submission information | |
|---|---|
| Preprint Link: | https://arxiv.org/abs/2007.01714v4 (pdf) |
| Date accepted: | 2020-10-28 |
| Date submitted: | 2020-10-23 13:49 |
| Submitted by: | Vinas Boström, Emil |
| Submitted to: | SciPost Physics |
| Ontological classification | |
|---|---|
| Academic field: | Physics |
| Specialties: |
|
| Approaches: | Theoretical, Computational |
Abstract
Driving a two-dimensional Mott insulator with circularly polarized light breaks time-reversal and inversion symmetry, which induces an optically-tunable synthetic scalar spin chirality interaction in the effective low-energy spin Hamiltonian. Here, we show that this mechanism can stabilize topological magnon excitations in honeycomb ferromagnets and in optical lattices. We find that the irradiated quantum magnet is described by a Haldane model for magnons that hosts topologically-protected edge modes. We study the evolution of the magnon spectrum in the Floquet regime and via time propagation of the magnon Hamiltonian for a slowly varying pulse envelope. Compared to similar but conceptually distinct driving schemes based on the Aharanov-Casher effect, the dimensionless light-matter coupling parameter $\lambda = eEa/\hbar\omega$ at fixed electric field strength is enhanced by a factor $\sim 10^5$. This increase of the coupling parameter allows to induce a topological gap of the order of $\Delta \approx 2$ meV with realistic laser pulses, bringing an experimental realization of light-induced topological magnon edge states within reach.
Author comments upon resubmission
We hereby resubmit our manuscript "Light-induced topological magnons in two-dimensional van der Waals magnets" for consideration in SciPost Physics. We have addressed all the questions and comments raised by the Referees in our responses, and done the appropriate changes to our manuscript. We thank the Referees for helping to improve our manuscript, and hope that our manuscript is now suitable for publication.
Best regards,
Emil Vinas Boström, Martin Claassen, James W. McIver, Gregor Jotzu, Angel Rubio and Michael A. Sentef
List of changes
We have focused the revised manuscript on light-induced topological magnons in generic S = 1/2 honeycomb ferromagnets, and moved the discussion of CrI3 to the section about possible material realizations.
We have added a brief discussion on the magnon edge states in armchair ribbons.
We have made sure our notation is unique and consistent. In particular, we have used the symbol tau to denote the time variable to reduced the risk of confusion with the hopping parameter t.
We have included a color bar in Fig. 3.
We have added a number of references suggested by the Referees.
Published as SciPost Phys. 9, 061 (2020)