Quantum plasmonic non-reciprocity in parity-violating magnets

Abstract

The optical response of metals is often dominated by plasmonic resonances -the collective oscillations of an interacting electron liquid. Here we unveil a new class of plasmons that arise in a wide range of parity violating magnetic metals. In these materials, broken time reversal and parity symmetries work together with electron-electron interactions to produce intrinsically non-reciprocal bulk plasmons wherein the frequencies of forward and backward moving modes are split. Strikingly, when interactions are strong we find plasmonic non-reciprocity is dominated by the quantum metric dipole that characterizes the real-space profile of Bloch electron wavepackets; in this regime, the quantum metric dipole can give rise to strongly non-reciprocal collective dynamics even when the electronic group velocity is only weakly asymmetric. We anticipate these intrinsic non-reciprocal bulk plasmons can be realized in a wide range of parity violating magnets including twisted bilayer graphene heterostructures where quantum geometric quantities can achieve large values.