Designing Rashba-Dresselhaus effect in magnetic insulators

TL;DR

This paper presents a theoretical approach to generate and control complex spin textures in insulating antiferromagnets with broken spatial inversion symmetry, enabling potential low-heating spintronic devices.

Contribution

It introduces a novel theory for creating rich spin textures in antiferromagnets using Dzyaloshinskii-Moriya interaction, controlled by small magnetic fields.

Findings

Proposes a systematic method to design spin textures in antiferromagnets.

Suggests detection of textures via magnonic spin current.

Enables antiferromagnetic memory applications.

Abstract

One of the major strategies to control magnetism in spintronics is to utilize the coupling between electron spin and its orbital motion. The Rashba and Dresselhaus spin-orbit couplings induce magnetic textures of band electrons called spin momentum locking, which produces a spin torque by the injection of electric current. However, joule heating had been a bottleneck for device applications. Here, we propose a theory to generate further rich spin textures in insulating antiferromagnets with broken spatial inversion symmetry (SIS), which is easily controlled by a small magnetic field. In antiferromagnets, the ordered moments host two species of magnons that serve as internal degrees of freedom in analogy with electron spins. The Dzyaloshinskii-Moriya interaction introduced by the SIS breaking couples the two-magnon-degrees of freedom with the magnon momentum. We present a systematic way to design such texture and to detect it via magnonic spin current for the realization of antiferromagnetic memory.