Topological insulators are insulating bulk materials hosting conducting surface states. Their magnetic doping breaks time-reversal symmetry and generates numerous interesting effects such as dissipationless transport. Nonetheless, their dynamical properties are still poorly understood. Here, we perform a systematic investigation of transverse spin excitations of $3d$ and $4d$ single impurities embedded in two prototypical topological insulators (${\mathrm{Bi}}_2{\mathrm{Te}}_3$ and ${\mathrm{Bi}}_2{\mathrm{Se}}_3$). The impurity-induced states within the bulk gap of the topological insulators are found to have a drastic impact on the spin excitation spectra, resulting in very high lifetimes reaching up to microseconds. An intuitive picture of the spin dynamics is obtained by mapping onto a generalized Landau-Lifshitz-Gilbert phenomenological model. The first quantity extracted from this mapping procedure is the magnetic anisotropy energy, which is then compared to the one provided by the magnetic force theorem. This uncovers some difficulties encountered with the latter, which can provide erroneous results for impurities with a high density of states at the Fermi energy. Moreover, the Gilbert damping and nutation tensors are obtained. The nutation effects can lead to a non-negligible shift in the spin excitation resonance in the high-frequency regime. Finally, we study the impact of the surface state on the spin dynamics, which may be severely altered due to the repositioning of the impurity-induced state in comparison to the bulk case. Our systematic investigation of this series of magnetic impurities sheds light on their spin dynamics within topological insulators, with implications for available and future experimental studies.

• Received 22 December 2018
• Revised 20 March 2019

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevMaterials.3.054201