Emergent curved space and gravitational lensing in quantum materials
arXiv:2506.04335 · doi:10.1103/qxnw-8q4y
Abstract
We show that an effective gravitational field naturally emerges in quantum materials with long-wavelength spin (or pseudospin) textures. When the itinerant electrons' spin strongly couples to the background spin texture, it effectively behaves as a spinless particle in a curved space, with the curvature arising from quantum corrections to the electron's spin orientation. The emergent curved space gives rise to the electron lensing effect, an analog of the gravitational lensing. The lensing effect can appear in systems without (emergent) magnetic fields, such as those with coplanar spin textures. Our work shows that novel ``gravitational'' phenomena generically appear in quantum systems due to nonadiabaticity, opening new research directions in quantum physics.
5 pages (including 3 figures) + Supplemental Materials (9 pages and 5 figures)
References in corpus (33)
- Topological Hall effect in the A-phase of MnSi
- Wave-packet dynamics in slowly perturbed crystals: Gradient corrections and Berry-phase effects
- Spin Anisotropy and Quantum Hall Effect in the Kagome Lattice - Chiral Spin State based on a Ferromagnet-
- Berry Phase Theory of Anomalous Hall Effect: Application to Colossal Magnetoresistance Manganites
- Topological Hall effect and Berry phase in magnetic nanostructures
- Viscosity of Quantum Hall Fluids
- Applications of the Gauss-Bonnet theorem to gravitational lensing
- Kubo formulas for viscosity: Hall viscosity, Ward identities, and the relation with conductivity
- Quantized Anomalous Hall Effects in Skyrmion Crystal
- Anomalous Hall Effect and Skyrmion Number in Real- and Momentum-space
- Torsional Response and Dissipationless Viscosity in Topological Insulators
- Black hole and Hawking radiation by type-II Weyl fermions
- Artificial gravity field, astrophysical analogues, and topological phase transitions in strained topological semimetals
- Black Hole Horizon in a Type-III Dirac Semimetal ZnInS
- Riemannian geometry of irrotational vortex acoustics
- Designer curved-space geometry for relativistic fermions in Weyl metamaterials
- Type-III and IV interacting Weyl points
- Continuous Generation of Spinmotive Force in a Patterned Ferromagnetic Film
- Ideal Chern bands are Landau levels in curved space
- Hall viscosity in quantum systems with discrete symmetry: point group and lattice anisotropy
- Emergent gravity and chiral anomaly in Dirac semimetals in the presence of dislocations
- Curved spacetime theory of inhomogeneous Weyl materials
- Giant proximity exchange and flat Chern band in 2D magnet-semiconductor heterostructures
- Low energy structure of spiral spin liquids
- Geometrodynamics of electrons in a crystal under position and time dependent deformation
- Electric voltage generation by antiferromagnetic dynamics
- Geodesic scattering by surface deformations of a topological insulator
- Black hole mirages: electron lensing and Berry curvature effects in inhomogeneously tilted Weyl semimetals
- The black hole interior and the type II Weyl fermions
- Anisotropic optics and gravitational lensing of tilted Weyl fermions
- Gravitational wave analogues in spin nematics and cold atoms
- Spiral Spin Liquid Noise
- Observation of the spiral spin liquid in a triangular-lattice material