The plethora of recent discoveries in the field of topological electronic insulators has inspired a search for boson systems with similar properties. There are predictions that ferromagnets on a two-dimensional honeycomb lattice may host chiral edge magnons. In such systems, we theoretically study how magnons and phonons couple. We find topological magnon polarons around the avoided crossings between phonons and topological magnons. Exploiting this feature along with our finding of Rayleigh-like edge phonons in armchair ribbons, we demonstrate the existence of chiral edge modes with a phononic character. We predict that these modes mediate a chirality in the coherent phonon response and suggest measuring this effect via elastic transducers. These findings reveal a possible approach towards heat management in future devices.
We theoretically investigate magnon-mediated superconductivity in a heterostructure consisting of a normal metal and a two-sublattice antiferromagnetic insulator. The attractive electron-electron pairing interaction is caused by an interfacial exchange coupling with magnons residing in the antiferromagnet, resulting in -wave, spin-triplet superconductivity in the normal metal. Our main finding is that one may significantly enhance the superconducting critical temperature by coupling the normal metal to only one of the two antiferromagnetic sublattices employing, for example, an uncompensated interface. Employing realistic material parameters, the critical temperature increases from vanishingly small values to significantly larger values than 1 K as the interfacial coupling becomes strongly sublattice asymmetric. We provide a general physical picture of this enhancement mechanism based on the notion of squeezed bosonic eigenmodes.
Altermagnets exhibit a large electron spin splitting which can be understood as a result of strong coupling between itinerant electrons and localized spins. We consider superconductivity due to electron-magnon scattering, using strong-coupling Eliashberg theory to capture many-body effects that are not covered by a weak-coupling approach. The characteristic band structure of altermagnets puts significant constraints on the spin structure of electron scattering on the Fermi surface. We emphasize the role of spin-preserving, double-magnon scattering processes compared to conventional spin-flip processes involving a single magnon. Then, we derive the Eliashberg equations for a situation where double-magnon scattering mediates spin-polarized Cooper pairs, while both double-magnon and single-magnon scatterings contribute to many-body effects. These many-body effects impact superconducting properties in a way that differs significantly from systems where conventional spin-flip processes mediate superconductivity. To highlight the role of -wave magnetism on superconductivity in altermagnets, we compare our results to those found in ferromagnetic half-metals and conventional antiferromagnetic metals.
We study superconductivity on the surface of a topological insulator, mediated by magnetic fluctuations in an adjacent ferromagnetic or antiferromagnetic insulator. Superconductivity can arise from effective interactions between helical fermions induced by interfacial fermion-magnon interactions. For both ferromagnetic and antiferromagnetic insulators, these fermion-fermion interactions have the correct structure to facilitate pairing between particles located on the same side of the Fermi surface, also known as Amperean pairing. In antiferromagnets, the strength of the induced interactions can be enhanced by coupling the topological insulator asymmetrically to the two sublattices of the antiferromagnet. This effect is further amplified by next-nearest-neighbor frustration in the antiferromagnetic insulator. The enhancement makes the induced interactions significantly stronger in the antiferromagnetic case compared to the ferromagnetic case. These results indicate that an uncompensated antiferromagnetic interface might be a better candidate than a ferromagnetic interface for proximity-induced magnon-mediated superconductivity on the surface of a topological insulator.
We perform Eliashberg calculations for magnon-mediated superconductivity in a normal metal, where the electron-magnon interaction arises from interfacial coupling to antiferromagnetic insulators. In agreement with previous studies, we find -wave pairing for large doping when the antiferromagnetic interfaces are uncompensated and -wave pairing close to half filling when the antiferromagnetic interfaces are compensated. However, for the -wave phase, we find a considerable reduction in the critical temperature compared to previous weak-coupling results, as the effective frequency cutoff on the magnon propagator in this case is found to be much smaller than the cutoff on the magnon spectrum. The -wave phase, on the other hand, relies less on long-wavelength magnons, leading to a larger effective cutoff on the magnon propagator. Combined with a large density of states close to half filling, this might allow the -wave phase to survive up to higher critical temperatures. Based on our findings, we provide insight into how to realize interfacially induced magnon-mediated superconductivity in experiments.
Topological superconductors are associated with the appearance of Majorana bound states, with promising applications in topologically protected quantum computing. In this Letter, we study a system where a skyrmion crystal is interfaced with a normal metal. Through interfacial exchange coupling, spin fluctuations in the skyrmion crystal mediate an effective electron-electron interaction in the normal metal. We study superconductivity within a weak-coupling approach and solve gap equations both close to the critical temperature and at zero temperature. Special features in the effective electron-electron interaction due to the noncolinearity of the magnetic ground state yield topological superconductivity at the interface.