Charged magnons on the surface of a topological insulator

I. Martinez-Berumen, W. A. Coish, T. Pereg-Barnea

Published 2023-01-18Version 1

We study a system of two-dimensional Dirac electrons (as is realized on the surface of a 3D topological insulator) coupled to an array of localized spins. The spins are coupled ferromagnetically to each other, forming an ordered ground state with low-energy spin-wave excitations (magnons). The Dirac electrons couple to the spins through a spin-dependent effective Zeeman field. The out-of-plane effective Zeeman field therefore serves as a Dirac mass that gaps the electronic spectrum. Once a spin is flipped, it creates a surrounding domain in which the sign of the Dirac mass is opposite to that of the rest of the sample. Therefore, an electronic bound state appears on the domain wall, as predicted by Jackiw and Rebbi. However, in a quantum magnet, a localized spin flip does not produce an eigenstate. Instead, the eigenstates correspond to delocalized spin waves (magnons). As in the case of the single flipped spin, the delocalized magnon also binds an in-gap electronic state. We name this excitation a `Jackiw-Rebbi-Magnon' (JRM) and study its signature in the dynamic spin susceptibility. When the sample is tunnel-coupled to an electronic reservoir, a magnon produced in a system without any electrons hybridizes with a JRM (which binds a single electron), producing magnon-JRM polaritons. For such a system, we identify a quantum phase transition when the magnon-JRM polariton energy falls below that of the fully polarized ferromagnetic ground state.