On topological frustration and graphene magnonics

TL;DR

This paper explores topological frustration in honeycomb lattices, showing it leads to flat bands and antiferromagnetic order in graphene nanomeshes, with potential applications in organic spintronics.

Contribution

It demonstrates that topological frustration causes flat bands and magnetic ordering in 2D honeycomb systems, enabling systematic design of graphene nanomeshes for spintronics.

Findings

Topological frustration persists in 2D honeycomb systems.

Flat electronic bands are systematically constructible in graphene nanomeshes.

These systems exhibit antiferromagnetic ordering and hybrid spin-wave excitations.

Abstract

The graph-theoretic topological frustration is a peculiar situation on a finite piece of the honeycomb lattice that prevents a full pairwise coupling of the lattice sites via nearest neighbor links, even when the total number of sites is an even number. This type of frustration is inherent for organic molecules that are classified as concealed non-Kekulean hydrocarbons, representing peculiar diradicals. Here we show that this topological frustration persists in 2D systems based on honeycomb lattice. Such systems exhibit fully flat electronic energy bands located at the Fermi level. Therefore, 2D ultimately flat bands can be systematically and predictably constructed for graphene monolayer nanomeshes. These systems are prone to antiferromagnetic ordering and hybrid spin-wave excitations mixing weak ferromagnetic and strong antiferromagnetic features, which could pave the way towards low-power, compact, and ultrafast organic spintronics with near room-temperature operation.