Hall effect of triplons in a dimerized quantum magnet

Judit Romhányi, Karlo Penc and R. Ganesh ()
Additional contact information
Judit Romhányi: Leibniz-Institute for Solid State and Materials Research, IFW-Dresden
Karlo Penc: Institute for Solid State Physics and Optics, Wigner Research Centre for Physics, Hungarian Academy of Sciences
R. Ganesh: Leibniz-Institute for Solid State and Materials Research, IFW-Dresden

Nature Communications, 2015, vol. 6, issue 1, 1-6

Abstract: Abstract SrCu2(BO3)2 is the archetypal quantum magnet with a gapped dimer-singlet ground state and triplon excitations. It serves as an excellent realization of the Shastry–Sutherland model, up to small anisotropies arising from Dzyaloshinskii–Moriya interactions. Here we demonstrate that these anisotropies, in fact, give rise to topological character in the triplon band structure. The triplons form a new kind of Dirac cone with three bands touching at a single point, a spin-1 generalization of graphene. An applied magnetic field opens band gaps resulting in topological bands with Chern numbers ±2. SrCu2(BO3)2 thus provides a magnetic analogue of the integer quantum Hall effect and supports topologically protected edge modes. At a threshold value of the magnetic field set by the Dzyaloshinskii–Moriya interactions, the three triplon bands touch once again in a spin-1 Dirac cone, and lose their topological character. We predict a strong thermal Hall signature in the topological regime.

Date: 2015
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms7805 Abstract (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:nat:natcom:v:6:y:2015:i:1:d:10.1038_ncomms7805

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://www.nature.com/ncomms/

DOI: 10.1038/ncomms7805

Access Statistics for this article

Nature Communications is currently edited by Nathalie Le Bot, Enda Bergin and Fiona Gillespie

More articles in Nature Communications from Nature
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().