Magnon bands in pyrochlore slabs with Heisenberg exchange and anisotropies

TL;DR

This paper investigates magnon band structures in pyrochlore slabs with various magnetic phases, anisotropies, and orientations, revealing non-reciprocal magnons and surface states linked to topological features.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive analysis of magnon excitations and surface states in finite pyrochlore slabs with complex interactions and multiple orientations, including topological characteristics.

Findings

Magnon bands can be non-reciprocal depending on slab orientation.

Surface localized magnons are identified for different phases and orientations.

Topological features like Weyl points and Chern numbers are associated with surface states.

Abstract

The pyrochlore lattice is a versatile venue to probe the properties of magnetically ordered states induced or perturbed by anisotropic terms like the Dzyaloshinskii-Moriya interactions or single-ion anisotropy. Several such ordered states have been investigated recently as precursors of topological magnons and the associated surface states. In parallel, there has been recent progress in growing thin films of magnetic materials with this lattice structure along high symmetry directions of the lattice. In both cases, an account of the magnetic excitations of relevant Hamiltonians for finite slabs is a necessary step in the analysis of the physics of these systems. We study here magnon bands in the slab geometry for a class of spin models on the pyrochlore lattice with Heisenberg exchange, Dzyaloshinskii-Moriya interaction and spin-ice anisotropy. For a range of model parameters, for both ferromagnetic and antiferromagnetic exchange, we compute the classical ground states for different slab orientations and determine the spin wave excitations above them. We analyze the ferromagnetic splay phase, the all-in-all-out phase and a coplanar phase and evaluate magnon dispersions for slabs oriented perpendicular to the $[111]$, $[100]$ and $[110]$ directions. For all the phases considered, depending on the slab orientation, magnon band structures can be non-reciprocal and we highlight the differences in the three orientations from this point-of-view. Finally, we present details of the surface localized magnons for all the three slab orientations in the phases we study. For the ferromagnetic splay phase and the all-in-all-out phase we analyze surface states associated with point degeneracies or nodal lines in the bulk spectrum by computing the magnonic Berry curvature and Weyl charges or Chern numbers associated with it.