Non-reciprocal magnons in a two dimensional crystal with off-plane magnetization

Nonreciprocal spin waves have a chiral asymmetry so that their energy is different for two opposite wave vectors. They are found in atomically thin ferromagnetic overlayers with in-plane magnetization and are linked to the antisymmetric Dzyaloshinskii-Moriya surface exchange. We use an itinerant fermion theory based on first-principles calculations to predict that nonreciprocal magnons can occur in Fe3GeTe2, the first stand-alone metallic two-dimensional crystal with out-of-plane magnetization. We find that both the energy and lifetime of magnons are nonreciprocal, and we predict that acoustic magnons can have lifetimes up to hundreds of picoseconds, orders of magnitude larger than in other conducting magnets.
N.M.R.P. acknowledges support from the European Commission through the project Graphene-Driven Revolutions in ICT and Beyond (Ref. No. 881603 -Core 3), and the Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology (FCT) in the framework of the Strategic Financing UID/FIS/04650/2013, COMPETE2020, PORTUGAL2020, FEDER, and the Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology (FCT) through Projects No. PTDC/FISNAN/3668/2013 and No. POCI-01-0145-FEDER-028114. J.F.-R. acknowledges financial support from FCT for Project No. UTAP-EXPL/NTec/0046/2017, as well as Generalitat Valenciana funding Prometeo2017/139 and MINECO-Spain (Grant No. MAT2016-78625-C2). A.T.C. acknowledges the use of computer resources at MareNostrum and technical support provided by the Barcelona Supercomputing Center (RES-FI-2019-2-0034, RES-FI-2019-3-0019).