Magnon thermal Hall effect in kagome antiferromagnets with Dzyaloshinskii-Moriya interactions

Abstract

We theoretically study magnetic and topological properties of antiferromagnetic kagome spin systems in the presence of both in- and out-of-plane Dzyaloshinskii-Moriya interactions. In materials such as the iron jarosites, the in-plane interactions stabilize a canted noncollinear "umbrella" magnetic configuration with finite scalar spin chirality. We derive expressions for the canting angle, and use the resulting order as a starting point for a spin-wave analysis. We find topological magnon bands, characterized by non-zero Chern numbers. We calculate the magnon thermal Hall conductivity, and propose the iron jarosites as a promising candidate system for observing the magnon thermal Hall effect in a noncollinear spin configuration. We also show that the thermal conductivity can be tuned by varying an applied magnetic field, or the in-plane Dzyaloshinskii-Moriya strength. In contrast with previous studies of topological magnon bands, the effect is found to be large even in the limit of small canting.