Tuning magnetic interactions with nonequilibrium optical phonon populations: a theoretical study

TL;DR

This theoretical study investigates how non-equilibrium optical phonons driven by light can modify magnetic interactions in insulators, enabling control over frustration and spin liquid regimes through spin-phonon pumping.

Contribution

It develops a general theory of spin-phonon pumping in magnetic insulators and demonstrates how non-equilibrium phonons can enhance anisotropy and generate complex magnetic interactions.

Findings

Non-equilibrium phonons can significantly alter magnetic interactions.

Spin-phonon pumping can generate further neighbor and chiral interactions.

Selective pumping can suppress or enhance specific magnetic terms.

Abstract

We theoretically explore how light-driven optical phonons can be used to drive magnetic exchange interactions into interesting physical regimes by developing a general theory of spin-phonon pumping in magnetic insulators with non-equilibrium optical phonon distributions, focusing on the diabatic regime where phonon frequencies are much larger than the magnetic interactions. We present several applications of spin-phonon pumping two-dimensional nearest-neighbor Heisenberg, XYZ and Kitaev models to examine what kind of further neighbor interactions and chiral fields can be generated, and how anisotropic couplings can be enhanced, showing that experimentally accessible non-equilibrium phonon distributions can generically drive significant frustration and realize a variety of spin liquid regimes. This effect is described for both direct and superexchange mechanisms, and we derive simple geometric rules for which phonon modes are ``spin-phonon'' active and for which magnetic interactions. Spin-phonon pumping provides an intriguing possibility for preferentially pumping specific magnetic interaction terms. In addition to generating further neighbor interactions, such pumping can lead to increased magnetic anisotropy for initially weakly anisotropic models, and selectively pumping the Kitaev-Heisenberg model can suppress undesirable Heisenberg terms while enhancing Kitaev interactions.