Light-induced topological magnons in two-dimensional van der Waals magnets

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 $\lambda =eEa/\hslash \omega$ 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.

21 pages, 4 figures

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Cited by in corpus (20)

• Controlling the anisotropy of a van der Waals antiferromagnet with light
• Interaction-stabilized topological magnon insulator in ferromagnets
• Cavity magnon-polaritons in cuprate parent compounds
• Sum-frequency excitation of coherent magnons
• Topological Floquet engineering using two frequencies in two dimensions
• Electronic transport in molecular junctions: The generalized Kadanoff-Baym ansatz with initial contact and correlations
• Direct optical probe of magnon topology in two-dimensional quantum magnets
• Observation of spin-wave moiré edge and cavity modes in twisted magnetic lattices
• Microscopic Theory of Ultrafast Skyrmion Excitation by Light
• Laser-induced topological $s$-wave superconductivity in bilayer transition metal dichalcogenides
• Driven Hubbard model on a triangular lattice: tunable Heisenberg antiferromagnet with three-spin chiral term
• Time-dependent strain-tuning topological magnon phase transition
• Equilibrium Parametric Amplification in Raman-Cavity Hybrids
• Strain Engineering of Photo-induced Topological Phases in 2D Ferromagnets
• Higher-order topology in twisted multilayer systems: a review
• Photocontrol of spin scalar chirality in centrosymmetric itinerant magnets
• Twisted superfluid and supersolid phases of triplons in bilayer honeycomb magnets
• All-Optical Generation of Antiferromagnetic Magnon Currents via the Magnon Circular Photogalvanic Effect
• Laser induced enhanced coupling between photons and squeezed magnons in antiferromagnets
• Light induced transitions of valley Chern numbers and flat bands in a non-twisted moire graphene-hexagonal boron nitride superlattice