Topological magnon bands in the zigzag and stripy phases of antiferromagnetic honeycomb lattice (1712.09801v1)

Abstract: We investigated the topological property of magnon bands in the collinear magnetic orders of zigzag and stripy phases for the antiferromagnetic honeycomb lattice and identified Berry curvature and symmetry constraints on the magnon band structure. Different symmetries of both zigzag and stripy phases lead to different topological properties, in particular, the magnon bands of the stripy phase being disentangled with a finite Dzyaloshinskii-Moriya (DM) term with non-zero spin Chern number. This is corroborated by calculating the spin Nernst effect. Our study establishes the existence of the non-trivial magnon band topology for all observed collinear antiferromagnetic honeycomb lattice in the presence of the DM term.