Rice physicists find ’magnon’ origins in 2D magnet

Topological feature could prove useful for encoding information in electron spins. Rice physicists have confirmed the topological origins of magnons, magnetic features they discovered three years ago in a 2D material that could prove useful for encoding information in the spins of electrons. Rice University graduate student Lebing Chen used a high-temperature furnace to make chromium triiodide crystals that yielded the 2D materials for experiments at Oak Ridge National Laboratory's Spallation Neutron Source. (Photo by Jeff Fitlow/Rice University) The discovery, described in a study published online this week in the American Physical Society journal PRX , provides a new understanding of topology-driven spin excitations in materials known as in 2D van der Waals magnets. The materials are of growing interest for spintronics , a movement in the solid-state electronics community toward technologies that use electron spins to encode information for computation, storage and communications. Spin is an intrinsic feature of quantum objects and the spins of electrons play a key role in bringing about magnetism. Rice physicist Pengcheng Dai , co-corresponding author of the PRX study, said inelastic neutron-scattering experiments on the 2D material chromium triiodine confirmed the origin of the topological nature of spin excitations, called magnons , that his group and others discovered in the material in 2018.