Piezospintronic effect in honeycomb antiferromagnets

TL;DR

This paper investigates the piezospintronic effect in honeycomb antiferromagnets, demonstrating how mechanical strains can generate pure spin currents and proposing an experimental detection method.

Contribution

It characterizes the piezospintronic response in 2D antiferromagnets and links strain to spin Berry phase, suggesting new ways to generate and detect spin currents.

Findings

Strain components relate to spin Berry phase.

Proposed experimental setup for detecting spin currents.

Applicable to various 2D antiferromagnetic materials.

Abstract

The emission of pure spin currents by mechanical deformations, the piezospintronic effect, in antiferromagnets is studied. We characterize the piezospintronic effect in an antiferromagnetic honeycomb monolayer in response to external strains. It is shown that the strain tensor components can be evaluated in terms of the spin Berry phase. In addition, we propose an experimental setup to detect the piezo-spin current generated in the piezospintronic material through the inverse spin Hall effect. Our results apply to a wide family of two-dimensional antiferromagnetic materials without inversion symmetry, such as the transition-metal chalcogenophosphates materials MPX3 (M=V, Mn; X=S, Se, Te) and NiPSe3.