Itinerant topological magnons in Haldane Hubbard model with a nearly-flat electron band (1908.09255v1)

Abstract: We elaborate the first theoretical realization of two dimensional itinerant topological magnons, based on the quarter filled Haldane-Hubbard model with a nearly-flat electron band. By using the exact diagonalization method with a projection onto this band, we obtain the spin wave excitations over the itinerant ferromagnetic ground state. In the flatband limit, the excitation exhibits similar dispersion to the free electron band with Dirac magnons. The nonflatness of the electron band opens a topological gap at Dirac points and leads to an acoustic magnon band with a nonzero Chern number. We further show that tuning the sublattice Hubbard interactions or the next-nearest-neighbor hopping can induce a topological transition characterized by the gap closing and reopening, and the existence of the in-gap magnons on magnetic domain walls. We find an exact set of bases for magnons in the flatband limit constructed from sublattice particle-hole vectors and derive an effective model to explore the origin of the topological magnon which is attributed to the ``mass inversion mechanism''.