Magnon-induced phononic Chern insulator
Rui-Chang Shen, Yihao Yang, Haoran Xue
Abstract
High-frequency artificial phononic crystals offer a low-loss platform compatible with on-chip integration, yet realizing Chern phononic phases at GHz frequencies remains challenging. Here, we propose a magnon-induced phononic Chern insulator in a honeycomb phononic crystal hybridized with ferromagnetic islands at the hexagon centers. A circularly polarized Kittel mode couples to the surrounding phonons with a phase winding, which breaks time-reversal symmetry and opens a full Chern gap. In the large-detuning regime, this mechanism leads to an effective Haldane-type phononic model with magnon-induced complex hopping. By tuning the magnon-phonon interaction, the full hybrid system accesses Chern phases with tunable Chern numbers |C|=1 and |C|=2. The predicted gaps can exceed realistic phonon and magnon linewidths, enabling their observation in GHz acoustic devices. Our work establishes chiral magnon--phonon hybridization as a route to magnetically reconfigurable topological phononics.