Cavity-Induced Strong Magnon-Magnon Coupling in Altermagnets

Abstract: Long-distance strong coupling between short-wavelength magnons remains an outstanding challenge in quantum magnonics, an emerging interdiscipline between magnonics and quantum information science. Recently, altermagnets are identified as the third elementary class of magnets that break the time-reversal symmetry without magnetization and thus combine characteristics of conventional collinear ferromagnets and antiferromagnets. In this work, we show that cavity photons can mediate the long-distance strong coupling of exchange magnons with opposite chiralities in altermagnets, manifesting as an anticrossing of the magnon-polariton spectrum in the extremely dispersive regime. The predicted effective magnon-magnon coupling strongly depends on the magnon propagation direction, and is thus highly anisotropic. Our findings are intimately connected to the intrinsic nature of altermagnetic magnons, i.e., chirality-splitting-induced crossing of exchange magnons, which has no counterpart in conventional ferromagnets or antiferromagnets, and may open a new path way for magnon-based quantum information processing in altermagnets.