Electronic manipulation of magnon topology by chirality injection from boundaries

Abstract

Magnon bands are known to exhibit nontrivial topology in ordered magnets under suitable conditions, engendering topological phases referred to as magnonic topological insulators. Conventional methods to drive a magnonic topological phase transition are bulk magnetic or thermal operations such as changing the direction of an external magnetic field or varying the temperature of the system, which are undesired in device applications of magnon topology. In this work, we lift the limitation of the magnon topology control on the bulk nonelectronic manipulation by proposing a scheme to manipulate magnonic topological phases by electronic boundary operations of spin chirality injection. More specifically, we consider a ferromagnetic honeycomb lattice and show that a finite spin chirality injected from the boundary of the system via the spin Hall effects introduces a tunable sublattice-symmetry-breaking mass term to the bosonic counterpart of the Haldane model for the Chern insulators and thereby allows us to electronically manipulate the bulk topology of magnons from the boundary. The “shoulder” in the thermal Hall conductivity profile is proposed as an experimental probe of the chirality-induced topological phase transition. The scheme for the boundary manipulation of the magnon topology is shown to work for a honeycomb antiferromagnet as well. We envisage that the interfacial chirality injection may offer a nonintrusive electronic means to tune the static and the dynamical bulk properties of general magnetic systems.