High-field expansion approach to kagome antiferromagnets with Dzyaloshinskii-Moriya interactions

Abstract

We apply linked cluster expansion techniques to study the polarized high-field phase of a spin-half antiferromagnet on the Kagome lattice with Heisenberg and Dzyaloshinskii-Moriya interactions (DMI). We find that the Dirac points of the single-magnon spectrum without DMI are robust against arbitrary DMI when the magnetic field lies in the Kagome plane. Unlike the typical case where DMI gaps the spectrum, here we find that varying the DMI merely shifts the location of the Dirac points. In contrast, a magnetic field with a component out of the Kagome plane gaps the spectrum, leading to topological magnon bands. We map out a topological phase diagram as the couplings are varied by computing the band Chern numbers. A pair of phase transitions are observed and we find an enhanced thermal Hall conductivity near the phase boundary.