Density Wave Mediated Dzyaloshinskii-Moriya Interactions

TL;DR

This paper explores how topologically nontrivial density wave states induce Dzyaloshinskii-Moriya interactions in localized spins, affecting magnon properties and ground state energies, with implications for thermal Hall effects.

Contribution

It demonstrates that density wave states can generate stable DM interactions and analyzes their effects on magnon dispersion and magnetic ground states, revealing overlooked linear terms.

Findings

Density wave states induce weak $d_{x^2-y^2}$ anisotropy in magnon dispersion.

Magnon contribution to thermal Hall conductivity $_{xy}$ is zero due to symmetry.

Linear terms in HP bosons influence critical behavior of the magnetic ground state.

Abstract

We investigate the effect that density wave states have on the localized spins of a square lattice. We find that topologically nontrivial density wave states can induce stable Dzyaloshinskii-Moriya (DM) interactions among the localized spins of the lattice in the presence of an external magnetic field, and we study the resulting spin models for both antiferromagnetic and ferromagnetic backgrounds. While the density wave state itself can contribute to the the thermal Hall effect, as shown by Li & Lee (arXiv:1905.04248v3), symmetry considerations preclude the resulting spin excitations from inducing a further thermal Hall effect. We utilize a Holstein-Primakoff (HP) substitution about the classical mean-field ground state to calculate the magnon dispersion for LSCO and find that the density wave induces a weak $d_{x^2-y^2}$ anisotropy; upon calculating the non-Abelian Berry curvature for this magnon branch we show explicitly that the magnon contribution to $\kappa_{xy}$ is zero. Finally, we calculate corrections to the magnetic ground state energy, spin canting angles, and the spin-wave dispersion due to the topological density wave for ferromagnetic backgrounds. We find that terms linear in the HP bosons can affect the critical behavior, a point previously overlooked in the literature.