No abstract

The long fascination that antiferromagnetic materials has exerted on the scientific community over about a century has been entirely renewed recently with the discovery of several unexpected phenomena, including various classes of anomalous spin and charge Hall effects and unconventional magnonic transport, and also homochiral magnetic entities such as skyrmions. With these breakthroughs, antiferromagnets stand out as a rich playground for the investigation of novel topological behavior, and as promising candidate materials for disruptive low-power microelectronic applications. Remarkably, the newly discovered phenomena are all related to the topology of the magnetic, electronic or magnonic ground state of the antiferromagnets. This review exposes how non-trivial topology emerges at different levels in antiferromagnets and explores the novel mechanisms that have been discovered recently. We also discuss how novel classes of quantum magnets could enrich the currently expanding field of antiferromagnetic spintronics and how spin transport can in turn favor a better understanding of exotic quantum excitations.

Scanning gate microscopy images from measurements made in the vicinity of quantum point contacts were originally interpreted in terms of current flow. Some recent work has analytically connected the local density of states to conductance changes in cases of perfect transmission, and at least qualitatively for a broader range of circumstances. In the present paper, we show analytically that in any time-reversal invariant system there are important deviations that are highly sensitive to imperfect transmission. Nevertheless, the unperturbed partial local density of states can be extracted from a weakly invasive scanning gate microscopy experiment, provided the quantum point contact is tuned anywhere on a conductance plateau. A perturbative treatment in the reflection coefficient shows just how sensitive this correspondence is to the departure from the quantized conductance value and reveals the necessity of local averaging over the tip position. It is also shown that the quality of the extracted partial local density of states decreases with increasing tip radius.Comment: 16 pages, 9 figure

We report a theoretical study of electron spin resonance in bulk topological insulators, such as Bi2Se3, Bi2Te3 and Sb2Te3. Using the effective four-band model, we find the electron energy spectrum in a static magnetic field and determine the response to electric and magnetic dipole perturbations, represented by oscillating electric and magnetic fields perpendicular to the static field. We determine the associated selection rules and calculate the absorption spectra. This enables us to separate the effective orbital and spin degrees of freedom and to determine the effective g factors for electrons and holes.