Observation of the Magnon Hall Effect

Abstract

The Hall effect usually occurs when the Lorentz force acts on a charge current in a conductor in the presence of perpendicular magnetic field. On the other hand, neutral quasi-particles such as phonons and spins can carry heat current and potentially show the Hall effect without resorting to the Lorentz force. We report experimental evidence for the anomalous thermal Hall effect caused by spin excitations (magnons) in an insulating ferromagnet with a pyrochlore lattice structure. Our theoretical analysis indicates that the propagation of the spin wave is influenced by the Dzyaloshinskii-Moriya spin-orbit interaction, which plays the role of the vector potential as in the intrinsic anomalous Hall effect in metallic ferromagnets.

12 pages, 4 figures. Submitted to Science on February 12 and published by Science on July 16, 2010 (10.1126/science.1188260). Supporting online material available at http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/sci;329/5989/297/DC1

References in corpus (3)

• Spin current and magneto-electric effect in non-collinear magnets
• Anomalous Hall effect for the phonon heat conductivity in paramagnetic dielectric
• Broken parity and a chiral ground state in the frustrated magnet CdCr2O4

Cited by in corpus (5)

• Theoretical prediction of rotating magnon wavepacket in ferromagnets
• Topological Magnon Insulator in Insulating Ferromagnet
• Topological Nature of the Phonon Hall Effect
• The phonon Hall effect: theory and application
• Local Susceptibility of the Yb2Ti2O7 Rare Earth Pyrochlore Computed from a Hamiltonian with Anisotropic Exchange