Ultrafast coherent magnon spin currents in antiferromagnets

Abstract: Generating coherent magnon spin currents with the highest frequencies and shortest wavelengths is a key challenge in ultrafast spintronics and magnonics. A promising route is to excite counter-propagating magnon pairs. In antiferromagnets, such pairs can be accessed in the ultrafast regime, where coherent dynamics are dominated by magnons at the edge of the Brillouin zone. However, it has seemed impossible to generate a net spin current from coherent magnon pairs. Here we show that a coherent superposition of multiple magnon-pair modes can produce such a current in parity-time symmetric antiferromagnets. The ultrafast coherent spin currents are excited with linearly polarized light, with the light polarization steering the current direction. Finally, by superposing two orthogonal spin currents, circular spin currents can be generated, which have not been discussed for steady-state currents.