Phono-magnetic analogs to opto-magnetic effects

TL;DR

This paper introduces phonon-based analogs to opto-magnetic effects, demonstrating through calculations that vibrational quanta can produce magnetic fields comparable or larger than light-based effects in magnetic materials.

Contribution

It presents the phenomenology and theoretical modeling of magneto-phononic effects, expanding the understanding of light-matter interactions to vibrational quanta.

Findings

Phonon analogs can exert significant magnetic fields on spins.

Magnitudes of phonon-induced fields can surpass opto-magnetic effects.

First-principles calculations support the potential of phononic effects.

Abstract

The magneto-optical and opto-magnetic effects describe the interaction of light with a magnetic medium. The most prominent examples are the Faraday and Cotton-Mouton effects that modify the transmission of light through a medium, and the inverse Faraday and inverse Cotton-Mouton effects that produce effective magnetic fields for the spin in the material. Here, we introduce the phenomenology of the analogous magneto-phononic and phono-magnetic effects, in which vibrational quanta take the place of the light quanta. We show, using a combination of first-principles calculations and phenomenological modeling, that the effective magnetic fields exerted by the phonon analogs of the inverse Faraday and inverse Cotton-Mouton effects on the spins of antiferromagnetic nickel oxide yield magnitudes comparable to and potentially larger than those of the opto-magnetic originals.