Magnon spin photogalvanic effect induced by Aharonov-Casher phase

Abstract

Magnons are electrically neutral bosonic quasiparticles emerging as collective spin excitations of magnetically ordered materials, and play a central role in the next-generation spintronics owing to its obviating Joule heating. A difficult obstacle for quantum magnonics is that the magnons do not couple to the external electric field directly so that a direct electric manipulation via bias or gate voltage as in conventional charge-based devices seems not applicable. In this work, we propose a new mechanism in which magnons can be excited and controlled by electric field of light directly. Since the electric field of light can be tuned in a wide and easy way, the proposal is of great interest in realistic applications. We call it as the magnon spin photogalvanic effect (SPGE), which comes from five contributions: the Drude, Berry curvature dipole (BCD), injection, shift, and rectification, with distinct geometric origins. We further show that the responses to linearly-polarized or circularly-polarized light are determined by band-resolved quantum metric or Berry curvature, the two combined together just comprise of a quantum geometric tensor. The proposed magnon SPGE can be measured by a characterized topological phase transition. We also discuss a breathing kagome-lattice model of ferromagnets and suggest possible candidate materials to implement it.