Dirac magnons in collinear antiferromagnets

ORAL

Abstract

We study the topological properties of magnon excitations in a large class of Heisenberg spin systems in three dimensions, where the ground state configuration is collinear and invariant under magnetic group symmetry $P*T$, a composite symmetry of time-reversal followed by space inversion. We prove that in these systems, ``Dirac points'' are symmetry-protected at band crossing between optical magnon bands, and the corresponding topological surface states have equal energy contours in the shape of non-contractible arcs, unseen in known topological materials. As a concrete example, we study a $J_1$-$J_2$ model for spin-web compound, and show the presence of the Dirac magnons using spin wave approximation.

Authors

  • Kangkang Li

    • Institute of Physics, Chinese Academy of Sciences
  • Chenyuan Li

    • Peking University
  • Yuan Li

    • Peking University
  • Chen Fang

    • Institute of Physics, Chinese Academy of Sciences