2019/12/31 by Dominik M. Juraschek, Prineha Narang, Nicola A. Spaldin · 2 citations
Physics and Astronomy · #cond-mat.mtrl-sci #physics.app-ph #physics.optics
paper · pdf · doi:10.1103/physrevresearch.2.043035
published as Phys. Rev. Research 2, 043035 (2020)
arxiv created 2020/10/12 · arxiv updated 2020/10/14
The magneto-optical and opto-magnetic effects describe the interaction of light with a magnetic medium. The most prominent examples are the Faraday and Cotton-Mouton effects that modify the transmission of light through a medium, and the inverse Faraday and inverse Cotton-Mouton effects that produce effective magnetic fields for the spin in the material. Here, we introduce the phenomenology of the analogous magneto-phononic and phono-magnetic effects, in which vibrational quanta take the place of the light quanta. We show, using a combination of first-principles calculations and phenomenological modeling, that the effective magnetic fields exerted by the phonon analogs of the inverse Faraday and inverse Cotton-Mouton effects on the spins of antiferromagnetic nickel oxide yield magnitudes comparable to and potentially larger than those of the opto-magnetic originals.