Observation of Switchable Chiral Magnons in an Altermagnet

Abstract

Chiral magnons, the quanta of handed spin waves, transport spin angular momentum without energy loss due to Joule heating. The recently discovered altermagnets were proposed to host chiral magnons arising from a non-relativistic exchange mechanism, similar to that in ferromagnets but without net magnetization, offering a stray-field-free platform for efficient magnon spin-current manipulation. In this work, we directly observed chiral magnons in the altermagnetic prototype MnTe using polarized inelastic neutron scattering. Furthermore, the magnon chirality was found to be reversibly switched by magnetic-field control, establishing a robust foundation for functional altermagnetic magnonics.