Extrinsic Mechanisms of Phonon Magnetic Moment

TL;DR

This paper develops a formalism for phonon magnetic moments including relaxation, identifying extrinsic contributions like skew-scattering and side-jump, and demonstrates their significance in a honeycomb lattice.

Contribution

It introduces a systematic framework for understanding phonon chirality and magnetic moments, emphasizing the role of extrinsic effects and non-adiabaticity.

Findings

Extrinsic contributions can be as significant as intrinsic ones.

Phonon angular momentum varies across the Brillouin zone.

Framework enables tuning of phonon magnetic moments via non-adiabaticity.

Abstract

We develop a general formalism of phonon magnetic moment by including the relaxation process. We then identify the skew-scattering and side-jump contributions to the phonon magnetic moment originating from the non-adiabaticity, both of which are related to the nonlocal phonon Berry curvature and are in close analogy to those in the electronic Hall effect. All contributions of the phonon magnetic moment are exemplified in a honeycomb lattice, showing that the extrinsic contribution can be as important as the intrinsic one and that the resulting phonon angular momentum varies significantly across the Brillouin zone. Our work offers a systematic framework of the phonon chirality and paves the way of tuning the phonon magnetic moment through the non-adiabaticity.