Consequences of spin-orbit coupling for the Bose-Einstein condensation of magnons

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In the first part we discuss how the BEC picture for magnons is modified by anisotropies induced by spin-orbit coupling. In particular we focus on the effects of antisymmetric spin interactions and/or a staggered component of the g (gyromagnetic) tensor. Such terms lead to a gapped quasiparticle spectrum and a nonzero condensate density for all temperatures so that no phase transition occurs. We contrast this to the effect of crystal field anisotropies which are also induced by spin-orbit coupling. In the second part we study the field-induced magnetic ordering in TlCuCl₃ on a quantitative level. We show that the usual BEC picture does not allow for a good description of the experimental magnetisation data and argue that antisymmetric spin interactions and/or a staggered g tensor component are still crucial, although both are expected to be tiny in this compound due to crystal symmetries. Including this type of interaction we obtain excellent agreement with experimental data.