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Abstract:
We establish theoretically a thermal Hall effect of collective magnetic excitations in noncollinear but coplanar antiferromagnets. In agreement with superordinate symmetry arguments for linear transport tensors, our findings demonstrate that neither a ferromagnetic moment, nor a magnetic field, nor a scalar spin chirality are indispensable for a magnon thermal Hall effect. Similar to the electronic anomalous Hall effect, the two necessary requirements are broken effective time-reversal symmetry and a magnetic point group compatible with ferromagnetism. As an example, we construct a minimal model for an antiferromagnet on the kagome lattice with the coplanar negative vector chiral order. In the presence of in-plane Dzyaloshinskii-Moriya interactions, the coplanar order stays intact but both magnon band gaps and a nonzero Berry curvature develop. This coplanar magnet realizes an antiferromagnetic magnon Chern insulator with a nonzero thermal Hall effect. We propose cadmium kapellasite CdCu3(OH)6(NO3)2⋅H2O as an approximate material realization.
