Dirac Magnons in a Honeycomb Lattice Quantum XY Magnet CoTiO₃

The discovery of massless Dirac electrons in graphene and topological Dirac-Weyl materials has prompted a broad search for bosonic analogues of such Dirac particles. Recent experiments have found evidence for Dirac magnons above an Ising-like ferromagnetic ground state in a two-dimensional (2D) kagome lattice magnet and in the van der Waals layered honeycomb crystal CrI3, and in a 3D Heisenberg magnet Cu3TeO6. Here, we report our inelastic neutron scattering investigation on a large single crystal of a stacked honeycomb lattice magnet CoTiO3, which is part of a broad family of ilmenite materials. The magnetically ordered ground state of CoTiO3 features ferromagnetic layers of Co2+, stacked antiferromagnetically along the c axis. The magnon dispersion relation is described very well with a simple magnetic Hamiltonian with strong easy-plane exchange anisotropy. Importantly, a magnon Dirac cone is found along the edge of the 3D Brillouin zone. Our results establish CoTiO3 as a model pseudospin-1/2 material to study interacting Dirac bosons in a 3D quantum XY magnet.