Imprinting and driving electronic orbital magnetism using magnons

Magnons, as the most elementary excitations of magnetic materials, have recently emerged as a prominent tool in electrical and thermal manipulation and transport of spin, and magnonics as a field is considered as one of the pillars of modern spintronics. On the other hand, orbitronics, which exploits the orbital degree of freedom of electrons rather than their spin, emerges as a powerful platform in efficient design of currents and redistribution of angular momentum in structurally complex materials. Here, we uncover a way to bridge the worlds of magnonics and electronic orbital magnetism, which originates in the fundamental coupling of scalar spin chirality, inherent to magnons, to the orbital degree of freedom in solids. We show that this can result in efficient generation and transport of electronic orbital angular momentum by magnons, thus opening the road to combining the functionalities of magnonics and orbitronics to their mutual benefit in the realm of spintronics applications.

Orbitronics: Mechanism of Orbital Current Generation and Dynamics

The orbital degree of freedom is often considered to be quenched in solids due to the potential of the crystal field. In contrast to such expectation, we showed recently that the orbital current can be electrically generated despite orbital quenching in equilibrium, leading to a phenomenon called the orbital Hall effect. In this article, we provide a pedagogical introduction to the concept of an orbital current in solids and the mechanism underlying the orbital Hall effect. We also discuss the relation between the orbital Hall effect and the spin Hall effect, as well as a way to utilize the orbital current in spin-orbitronic devices.

Tuning Crystal Field Potential by Orbital Dilution in Strongly Correlated d4 Oxides

We investigate the interplay between Coulomb-driven orbital order and octahedral distortions in strongly correlated Mott insulators due to orbital dilution, i.e., doping by metal ions without an orbital degree of freedom. In particular, we focus on layered transition metal oxides and study the effective spin–orbital exchange due to d3 substitution at d4 sites. The structure of the d3 − d4 spin–orbital coupling between the impurity and the host in the presence of octahedral rotations favors a distinct type of orbital polarization pointing towards the impurity and outside the impurity–host plane. This yields an effective lattice potential that generally competes with that associated with flat octahedra and, in turn, can drive an inversion of the crystal field interaction.