Experimental observation of repulsively bound magnons

Stable composite objects, such as hadrons, nuclei, atoms, molecules and superconducting pairs, formed by attractive forces are ubiquitous in nature. By contrast, composite objects stabilized by means of repulsive forces were long thought to be theoretical constructions owing to their fragility in naturally occurring systems. Surprisingly, the formation of bound atom pairs by strong repulsive interactions has been demonstrated experimentally in optical lattices1. Despite this success, repulsively bound particle pairs were believed to have no analogue in condensed matter owing to strong decay channels. Here we present spectroscopic signatures of repulsively bound three-magnon states and bound magnon pairs in the Ising-like chain antiferromagnet BaCo2V2O8. In large transverse fields, below the quantum critical point, we identify repulsively bound magnon states by comparing terahertz spectroscopy measurements to theoretical results for the Heisenberg–Ising chain antiferromagnet, a paradigmatic quantum many-body model2–5. Our experimental results show that these high-energy, repulsively bound magnon states are well separated from continua, exhibit notable dynamical responses and, despite dissipation, are sufficiently long-lived to be identified. As the transport properties in spin chains can be altered by magnon bound states, we envision that such states could serve as resources for magnonics-based quantum information processing technologies6–8.