Gapless Spin Wave Transport through a Quantum Canted-Antiferromagnet

TL;DR

This study demonstrates an all-electrical method to detect gapless, linearly dispersed spin waves in bilayer graphene, providing experimental evidence for canted antiferromagnetic order and paving the way for spin superfluidity and magnonic devices.

Contribution

It introduces a novel cavity-based electrical technique to probe spin wave dispersion in graphene heterostructures, revealing gapless excitations consistent with canted antiferromagnetism.

Findings

Detected gapless, linearly dispersed spin waves in bilayer graphene.

Measured high group velocity and phase coherence of spin waves.

Confirmed dependence of spin wave properties on magnetic field and temperature.

Abstract

In the Landau levels of a two-dimensional electron system or when flat bands are present, e.g. in twisted van der Waals bilayers, strong electron-electron interaction gives rise to quantum Hall ferromagnetism with spontaneously broken symmetries in the spin and isospin sectors. Quantum Hall ferromagnets support a rich variety of low-energy collective excitations that are instrumental to understand the nature of the magnetic ground states and are also potentially useful as carriers of quantum information. Probing such collective excitations, especially their dispersion {\omega}(k), has been experimentally challenging due to small sample size and measurement constraints. In this work, we demonstrate an all-electrical approach that integrates a Fabry-P\'erot cavity with non-equilibrium transport to achieve the excitation, wave vector selection and detection of spin waves in graphene heterostructures. Our experiments reveal gapless, linearly dispersed spin wave excitations in the E = 0 Landau level of bilayer graphene, thus providing direct experimental evidence for a predicted canted antiferromagnetic order. We show that the gapless spin wave mode propagates with a high group velocity of several tens of km/s and maintains phase coherence over a distance of many micrometers. Its dependence on the magnetic field and temperature agree well with the hydrodynamic theory of spin waves. These results lay the foundation for the quest of spin superfluidity in this high-quality material. The resonant cavity technique we developed offers a powerful and timely method to explore the collective excitation of many spin and isospin-ordered many-body ground states in van der Waals heterostructures and open the possibility of engineering magnonic devices.