Phonon Hall Viscosity in Magnetic Insulators

Abstract: The Phonon Hall Viscosity is the leading term evincing time-reversal symmetry breaking in the low energy description of lattice phonons. It may generate phonon Berry curvature, and can be observed experimentally through the acoustic Faraday effect and thermal Hall transport. We present a systematic procedure to obtain the phonon Hall viscosity induced by phonon-magnon interactions in magnetic insulators under an external magnetic field. We obtain a general symmetry criterion that leads to non-zero Faraday rotation and Hall conductivity, and clarify the interplay between lattice symmetry, spin-orbit-coupling, external magnetic field and magnetic ordering. The symmetry analysis is verified through a microscopic calculation. By constructing the general symmetry-allowed effective action that describes the spin dynamics and spin-lattice coupling, and then integrating out the spin fluctuations, the leading order time-reversal breaking term in the phonon effective action, i.e. the phonon Hall viscosity, can be obtained. The analysis of the square lattice antiferromagnet for a cuprate Mott insulator, Sr$_2$CuO$_2$Cl$_2$, is presented explicitly, and the procedure described here can be readily generalized to other magnetic insulators.