arXiv · 2609.24182
Ferroelectric switching of odd-parity magnon spin splitting
Abstract
Magnetic symmetry can lift spin degeneracy in momentum space without producing net magnetization, generating spin textures classified by their parity under momentum reversal. Even-parity textures have well established in altermagnets. Odd-parity spin textures have recently emerged in electronic bands of compensated magnets, but their counterpart in collective bosonic excitations remains experimentally unresolved. Magnons provide a natural setting for this extension because they carry spin angular momentum through insulating magnets without accompanying charge flow. Beyond realizing this missing state, a broader challenge is to program spin splitting with voltage at room temperature. Here we report room-temperature transport evidence for ferroelectric switching odd-parity magnon spin splitting in multiferroic BiFeO3. Symmetry analysis and spin-wave calculations reveal that the cycloidal chirality splits opposite-spin magnon branches with an odd-in-momentum dependence and sets the sign. Experimentally, an injected in-plane-polarized spin current generates an out-of-plane magnon spin component during propagation. This component exhibits the crystalline angular dependence predicted by theory and reverses upon ferroelectric switching, providing a transport fingerprint of the spin-split magnon state. We use the programmed magnon spin to drive deterministic field-free switching of a perpendicular ferromagnet and demonstrate XNOR logic-in-memory. Our results extend odd-parity spin splitting from fermionic electronic states to bosonic collective modes and establish nonvolatile electrical control at room temperature.
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Yuhan Liang, Xingyu Yan, Bowen Hao, Ziye Zhu, Tianle Sui, Daniel Pharis, Xiaoxi Huang, Rakshit Jain, Tong Zhou, Di Yi, Wanjun Jiang, Pu Yu, Igor Žutić, Yuan-Hua Lin, Daniel C. Ralph, Tianxiang Nan. 2026-09-21. Ferroelectric switching of odd-parity magnon spin splitting. https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.24182
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