Topological phases have been explored in various fields in physics such as spintronics, photonics, liquid helium, correlated electron system, and cold-atomic system. This leads to the recent foundation of emerging materials such as topological band insulators, topological photonic crystals, and topological superconductors/superfluid. In this paper, we propose a topological magnonic crystal which provides protected chiral edge modes for magnetostatic spin waves. Based on a linearized Landau-Lifshitz equation, we show that a magnonic crystal with the dipolar interaction acquires a spin-wave volume-mode band with nonzero Chern integer. We argue that such magnonic systems are accompanied by the same integer numbers of chiral spin-wave edge modes within a band gap for the volume-mode bands. In these edge modes, the spin wave propagates in a unidirectional manner without being scattered backward, which implements novel fault-tolerant spintronic devices.

• Received 6 April 2013

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevB.87.174427