Thermal Hall effect from a two-dimensional Schwinger boson gas with Rashba spin-orbit interaction: Application to ferromagnets with in-plane Dzyaloshinskii-Moriya interaction

Abstract

Recently, uncovering the sources of thermal Hall effect in insulators has become an important issue. In the case of ferromagnetic insulators, it is well known that Dzyaloshinskii-Moriya (DM) interaction can induce magnon thermal Hall effect. Specifically, the DM vector parallel to the magnetization direction induces complex magnon hopping amplitudes, so that magnons act as if they feel Lorentz force. However, the DM vector which is orthogonal to the magnetization direction has hitherto been neglected as a possible source of magnon thermal Hall effect. This is because they play no role in the linear spin wave theory, an often invoked approximation when computing the magnon thermal Hall effect. Here, we challenge this expectation by presenting the self-consistent Schwinger-boson mean field study of two-dimensional magnets with ferromagnetic Heisenberg interaction and in-plane DM interaction. We find that the relevant Schwinger-boson mean field Hamiltonian takes the form of two-dimensional electron gas with Rashba spin-orbit interaction, which is known to show anomalous Hall effect, spin Hall effect, and Rashba-Edelstein effect, whose thermal counterparts also appear in our system. Importantly, the thermal Hall effect can be induced when out-of-plane magnetic field is applied, and persists even when the magnetic field is large, so that the spins are significantly polarized, and the linear spin wave theory is expected to be a reasonable approximation. Since the linear spin wave theory predicts vanishing thermal Hall effect, our result implies that linear spin wave is not a sufficient approximation, and that magnon-magnon interaction must be taken into account to predict the correct thermal Hall conductivity.