Signatures of magnon hydrodynamics in an atomically-thin ferromagnet

Strong interactions between particles can lead to emergent collective excitations. These phenomena have been extensively established in electronic systems, but are also expected to occur for gases of neutral particles like spin waves, also known as magnons, in a ferromagnet. In a hydrodynamic regime where magnons are strongly interacting, they can form a slow collective density mode – in analogy to sound waves in water – with characteristic low-frequency signatures. While such a mode has been predicted in theory, its signatures have yet to be observed experimentally. In this work, we isolate atomically-thin sheets of ferromagnetic CrCl_3 where magnon interactions are strong, and develop a technique to measure its collective magnon dynamics via the quantum coherence of nearby Nitrogen-Vacancy (NV) centers in diamond. We find that the thermal magnetic fluctuations generated by CrCl_3 exhibit an anomalous temperature-dependence, whereby fluctuations increase upon decreasing temperature. Our analysis reveals that this anomalous trend is a consequence of the damping rate of a low-energy magnon sound mode which sharpens as magnon interactions increase with increasing temperature, providing a first glimpse of the magnon hydrodynamic regime.