Unconventional Thermal Magnon Hall Effect in a Ferromagnetic Topological Insulator
Unconventional Thermal Magnon Hall Effect in a Ferromagnetic Topological Insulator
Christian Moulsdale, Pierre A. Pantaleón, Ramon Carrillo-Bastos, Yang Xian
AbstractWe present theoretically the thermal Hall effect of magnons in a ferromagnetic lattice with a Kekul\'e-O coupling (KOC) modulation and a Dzyaloshinskii-Moriya interaction (DMI). Through a strain-based mechanism for inducing the KOC modulation, we identify four topological phases in terms of the KOC parameter and DMI strength. We calculate the thermal magnon Hall conductivity ${\kappa^{xy}}$ at low temperature in each of these phases. We predict an unconventional conductivity due to a non-zero Berry curvature emerging from band proximity effects in the topologically trivial phase. We find sign changes of ${\kappa^{xy}}$ as a function of the model parameters, associated with the local Berry curvature and occupation probability of the bulk bands. Throughout, ${\kappa^{xy}}$ can be easily tuned with external parameters such as the magnetic field and temperature.
2 comments
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Question from one of the expert in our Board. How do you define the thermal Hall effect in this system?
The usual linear response approach to, say, electrical transport calculates current-current corellator and the corresponding Drude diagram, where the vertices are $e {\bf v}$. But with thermal transport - transport of energy its much trickier, because it's not clear how to define energy current especially in interacting systems. Do you face a similar challenge in this system? It's not entirely obvious where Eqs. (15) & (16) come from.
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