Scattering Theory of Chiral Edge Modes in Topological Magnon Insulators

Abstract: Topological magnon insulators exhibit robust edge modes with chiral properties similar to quantum Hall edge states. However, due to their strong localization at the edges, interactions between these chiral edge magnons can be significant, as we show in a model of coupled magnon-conserving spin chains in an electric field gradient. The chiral edge modes remain edge-localized and do not scatter into the bulk, and we characterize their scattering phase: for strongly-localized edge modes we observe significant deviation from the bare scattering phase. This renormalization of edge scattering can be attributed to bound bulk modes resonating with the chiral edge magnons, in the spirit of Feshbach resonances in atomic physics. We argue a real-time measurement protocol using spin-polarized scanning tunneling spectroscopy to study their scattering dynamics. Our result show that interaction among magnons can be encoded in an effective edge model of reduced dimensionality, where the interactions with the bulk renormalize the effective couplings. This work paves the way to develop a many-body effective theory for chiral edge magnons.