Emergent energy scales in magnonic systems with relative motion

Abstract Relative motion between interacting systems can generate emergent energy scales that are absent in isolated systems. While uniform motion can be eliminated by a Galilean transformation, relative motion between interacting systems generally cannot. By coupling to an excitation's spatial structure, relative motion generates a Doppler frequency determined by its wavevector and the relative velocity, providing a mechanism for driving nonequilibrium phenomena. In this tutorial, we illustrate these ideas using magnonic systems as a concrete platform. We first discuss motion-induced magnon transport between relatively moving ferromagnets, in which the Doppler frequency serves as an effective nonequilibrium bias in the perturbative regime. This mechanism produces magnon currents even without conventional driving forces such as temperature gradients or chemical potential differences. We then introduce motion-induced parametric instabilities. When the emergent scale becomes sufficiently large to resonantly create magnon pairs, the perturbative description breaks down, and the magnonic vacuum becomes unstable. This instability occurs above a critical velocity threshold and leads to spontaneous magnon-pair creation. Connections to related phenomena, including quantum friction, Cherenkov emission, and Zel’dovich superradiance, are also highlighted. The concept of an emergent energy scale provides a unifying framework for understanding transport phenomena and instabilities in quantum systems with relative motion.