Magnonic quantum spin Hall state in the zigzag and stripe phases of the antiferromagnetic honeycomb lattice

Abstract

We investigated the topological property of magnon bands in the collinear magnetic orders of zigzag and stripe phases for the antiferromagnetic honeycomb lattice and identified Berry curvature and symmetry constraints on the magnon band structure. Different symmetries of both zigzag and stripe phases lead to different topological properties, in particular, the magnon bands of the stripe phase being disentangled with a finite Dzyaloshinskii-Moriya (DM) term with nonzero spinChern number. This is corroborated by calculating the spin Nernst effect. Our study establishes the existence of a nontrivial magnon band topology for all observed collinear antiferromagnetic honeycomb lattices in the presence of the DM term ©2018 American Physical Society