Topological magnon bands in the zigzag and stripy phases of antiferromagnetic honeycomb lattice

TL;DR

This paper explores the topological properties of magnon bands in antiferromagnetic honeycomb lattices, revealing how symmetry and Dzyaloshinskii-Moriya interactions lead to non-trivial topological magnon states.

Contribution

It demonstrates the existence of topologically non-trivial magnon bands in collinear antiferromagnetic honeycomb lattices with Dzyaloshinskii-Moriya interactions, highlighting symmetry effects.

Findings

Magnon bands exhibit non-zero spin Chern numbers.

Symmetry differences lead to distinct topological properties.

Spin Nernst effect corroborates topological magnon states.

Abstract

We investigated the topological property of magnon bands in the collinear magnetic orders of zigzag and stripy phases for the antiferromagnetic honeycomb lattice and identified Berry curvature and symmetry constraints on the magnon band structure. Different symmetries of both zigzag and stripy phases lead to different topological properties, in particular, the magnon bands of the stripy phase being disentangled with a finite Dzyaloshinskii-Moriya (DM) term with non-zero spin Chern number. This is corroborated by calculating the spin Nernst effect. Our study establishes the existence of the non-trivial magnon band topology for all observed collinear antiferromagnetic honeycomb lattice in the presence of the DM term.