Imprinting and driving electronic orbital magnetism using magnons

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates how magnons can be used to generate and transport electronic orbital angular momentum, bridging magnonics and orbitronics for advanced spintronics applications.

Contribution

It uncovers a fundamental coupling mechanism between magnons' scalar spin chirality and electronic orbital degrees of freedom, enabling new functionalities.

Findings

Magnons can induce electronic orbital angular momentum.

Efficient transport of orbital angular momentum by magnons.

Bridging magnonics and orbitronics for spintronics applications.

Abstract

Magnons, as the most elementary excitations of magnetic materials, have recently emerged as a prominent tool in electrical and thermal manipulation and transport of spin, and magnonics as a field is considered as one of the pillars of modern spintronics. On the other hand, orbitronics, which exploits the orbital degree of freedom of electrons rather than their spin, emerges as a powerful platform in efficient design of currents and redistribution of angular momentum in structurally complex materials. Here, we uncover a way to bridge the worlds of magnonics and electronic orbital magnetism, which originates in the fundamental coupling of scalar spin chirality, inherent to magnons, to the orbital degree of freedom in solids. We show that this can result in efficient generation and transport of electronic orbital angular momentum by magnons, thus opening the road to combining the functionalities of magnonics and orbitronics to their mutual benefit in the realm of spintronics applications.