Research: Magnon Interference Tunneling Spectroscopy as a Probe of 2D Magnetism

One of the most exciting recent developments in magnetism is the fabrication of truly 2D magnets on nonmagnetic substrates opening up the possibility of both engineering and exploring novel exotic and interesting low-dimensional collective phenomena. However a pressing challenge in this area is to develop new techniques to probe such systems. A group a of researchers from the Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur in India,  Instituto Superior Técnico in Lisbon, Portugal and the Max Planck Institute for the Physics of Complex Systems (MPI-PKS) in Dresden, Germany, propose a solution to this long-standing problem. The idea is to exploit tunneling spectroscopy in the presence of magnetic impurities to obtain information about the magnon dispersion relations in analogy to quasiparticle interference in nonmagnetic materials. They show that this technique can be used to establish the dispersion relations even for frustrated magnets and allows one in principle also to probe the nature of surface states in magnonic topological bands.

A. Mitra, A. Corticelli, P. Ribeiro, and P. A. McClarty,
Magnon Interference Tunneling Spectroscopy as a Probe of 2D Magnetism,
Phys. Rev. Lett. 130, 066701 (2023) (arXiv)