Topological chiral magnonic edge mode in a magnonic crystal

TL;DR

This paper introduces a topological magnonic crystal that hosts protected chiral edge modes for spin waves, enabling unidirectional, scattering-free propagation with potential applications in fault-tolerant spintronics.

Contribution

It proposes a new topological magnonic crystal with non-zero Chern numbers, demonstrating the existence of chiral edge modes in magnetostatic spin waves.

Findings

Magnonic crystal exhibits non-zero Chern integers in spin-wave bands.

Chiral edge modes propagate unidirectionally without backscattering.

Potential for fault-tolerant spintronic devices.

Abstract

Topological phases have been explored in various fields in physics such as spintronics, photonics, liquid helium, correlated electron system and cold-atomic system. This leads to the recent foundation of emerging materials such as topological band insulators, topological photonic crystals and topological superconductors/superfluid. In this paper, we propose a topological magnonic crystal which provides protected chiral edge modes for magnetostatic spin waves. Based on a linearized Landau-Lifshitz equation, we show that a magnonic crystal with the dipolar interaction acquires spin-wave volume-mode band with non-zero Chern integer. We argue that such magnonic systems are accompanied by the same integer numbers of chiral spin-wave edge modes within a band gap for the volume-mode bands. In these edge modes, the spin wave propagates in a unidirectional manner without being scattered backward, which implements novel fault-tolerant spintronic devices.