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Visualizing Uniaxial-strain Manipulation of Antiferromagnetic Domains in Fe1+YTe Using a Spin-polarized Scanning Tunneling Microscope
Published on: March 24, 2019
Geometric Spin Rotation in Triangular Antiferromagnets
Grigor Adamyan1,2, Bastián Pradenas1,3, Boris Ivanov1,4
1Johns Hopkins University, William H. Miller III Department of Physics and Astronomy, Baltimore, Maryland 21218, USA.
Abstract:
We describe a geometric phenomenon in which a traveling wave made of degenerate Goldstone modes leaves behind a transformed ground state. In a triangular Heisenberg antiferromagnet, a pulse of circularly polarized spin waves rotates the spins within their plane. An exact solution of the nonlinear equations of motion demonstrates that the accumulated rotation is a geometric phase related to parallel transport of the order parameter. We point out a curious analogy between the motion of the magnetic order parameter and that of a wobbling coin. This phenomenon opens a new route for controlling antiferromagnetic order by spin waves and may extend to other frustrated magnets as well as other physical systems with noncommuting broken-symmetry generators.
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