UC Berkeley

Antiferromagnets are promising platforms for transduction and transmission of quantum information via magnons—the quanta of spin waves—and they offer advantages over ferromagnets in regard to dissipation, speed of response and robustness to external fields. Recently, transduction was shown in a van der Waals antiferromagnet, where strong spin-exciton coupling enables readout of the amplitude and phase of coherent magnons by photons of visible light. This discovery shifts the focus of research to transmission, specifically to exploring the non-local interactions that enable magnon wave packets to propagate. Here we demonstrate that magnon propagation is mediated by long-range dipole–dipole interaction. This coupling is an inevitable consequence of fundamental electrodynamics and, as such, will likely mediate the propagation of spin at long wavelengths in the entire class of van der Waals magnets currently under investigation. Successfully identifying the mechanism of spin propagation provides a set of optimization rules, as well as caveats, that are essential for any future applications of these promising systems.