What are magnons?

Good morning. This BECNF theory is on my mind this morning, so I'll start with that as my first post. I found the blog below in my quest to understand the theory, and that starts with understanding quasiparticles and such.

by Doug Natelson of nanoscale views

1. Another in my continuing series trying to explain some condensed matter concepts in comparatively jargon-free language.
2. electron-like quasiparticles, phonons, and plasmons. Now we consider magnons, also known as "spin waves".
3. Magnons, as the name suggests, are intimately related to magnetism.
4. there are magnetic moments associated with (some or all of) the atoms in the material, and you can think of these moments as little arrows. 
5. the system can lower its energy by having the moments tend to align with each other.
6. A magnon is a collective excitation where the relative alignment between neighboring magnetic moments is spatially described by some wavelength 

I think of the difference between quasiparticles and particles as the difference between waves at the beach vs the water itself.  Get the analogy?  You can have waves in solids, they are called phonons.  You can have waves in magnetism, therefore, these are called magnons.  I think I've got it.

By the way, I haven't looked up plasmons.  I take it that these are waves too.

Now, the thing that makes these of interest to me is that they can become BECs.  The theory is that these BEC's in the magnon case might be negating the Coulomb barrier which will allow fusion to take place.

Update:

I am adding the blog "nanoscale views" to the sidebar in the section of interesting reading.  This post will be categorized appropriately and labeled "sidebar entry" so as to be able to trace the history of the blog.