Impact of triplon damping on thermal Hall conductivity in Shastry-Sutherland model

TL;DR

This paper studies how triplon damping affects the thermal Hall conductivity in the Shastry-Sutherland model, revealing that quasiparticle interactions suppress the effect at finite temperatures.

Contribution

It introduces a nonlinear flavor-wave theory approach to quantify triplon damping and its impact on thermal Hall conductivity in the presence of topologically non-trivial band structures.

Findings

Triplon-triplon interactions cause damping of quasiparticles.

Damping suppresses the thermal Hall conductivity at finite temperatures.

Topologically non-trivial triplon bands are affected by quasiparticle scattering.

Abstract

We investigate the thermal Hall effect in the Shastry-Sutherland model, incorporating interactions between quasiparticle excitations. In this model, with strong nearest-neighbor interactions, the ground state is well described by the direct product of spin-singlet states, and the elementary excitations to spin-triplet states are known as triplons. In candidate materials for this model, Dzyaloshinskii-Moriya interactions are inevitably present, resulting in topologically non-trivial band structures for triplon excitations. In this study, we examine quasiparticle damping due to triplon-triplon interactions as a potential factor contributing to the suppression of the thermal Hall effect. We apply nonlinear flavor-wave theory to the Shastry-Sutherland model and treat triplons as bosonic excitations. We calculate the triplon damping rate using the imaginary Dyson equation approach and evaluate the thermal Hall conductivity. Our findings demonstrate that triplons with nonzero Berry curvature are scattered by thermally excited triplons. This scattering effect suppresses the thermal Hall conductivity, particularly at finite temperatures, highlighting the significant role of triplon damping in the thermal Hall effect.