Ultrafast control of spin interactions in honeycomb antiferromagnetic insulators

Abstract

Light enables the ultrafast, direct, and nonthermal control of the exchange and Dzyaloshinskii-Moriya interactions. We consider two-dimensional honeycomb lattices described by the Kane-Mele-Hubbard model at half filling and in the strongly correlated regime, i.e., an antiferromagnetic spin-orbit Mott insulator. Based on the Floquet theory, we demonstrate that by changing the amplitude and frequency of polarized laser pulses, one can tune the amplitudes and signs of and even the ratio between the exchange and Dzyaloshinskii-Moriya spin interactions. Furthermore, the renormalizations of the spin interactions are independent of the helicity. Our results pave the way for ultrafast optical spin manipulation in recently discovered two-dimensional magnetic materials.