Linear response across interaction regimes in two-dimensional ferromagnets

Abstract

Recent discoveries of two-dimensional (2D) ferromagnets have stimulated intense interest in understanding and controlling their spin transport properties. A central microscopic feature of these systems is that exchange-driven magnon--magnon interactions are strongly momentum dependent: low-momentum magnons interact weakly, while high-momentum ones can scatter strongly and exhibit collective hydrodynamic behavior. Understanding transport in such systems therefore requires a microscopic description capable of capturing ballistic and hydrodynamic regimes on equal footing. The natural framework is the quantum Boltzmann equation (QBE), whose solution is notoriously difficult because of the multidimensional collision integrals. Here, we develop a method based on an efficient representation of distribution functions as sums of Gaussians, which renders the collision integrals tractable. This approach enables accurate solution of the linearized QBE and computation of momentum- and frequency-resolved linear response in 2D ferromagnets across a broad range of temperatures and magnetic fields. In particular, we resolve a temperature-driven crossover from a ballistic regime dominated by weakly interacting low-momentum magnons to a collective hydrodynamic regime governed by strongly interacting high-momentum modes. Applying this method to monolayer CrCl$_3$, we obtain good agreement with recent nitrogen-vacancy-center dephasing experiments that reported anomalous magnetic noise consistent with magnon sound. More broadly, our work establishes a general framework for computing momentum- and frequency-resolved linear response in interacting 2D quantum systems describable within quantum Boltzmann kinetics.