Altermagnetism, a recently discovered collinear magnetic order with net zero magnetization but exhibits spin-splitting band structure, has attracted much research interest due to the rich fundamental physics and possible applications. In this work, we investigate the opto-magnetic response of d-wave altermagnets, focusing on the inverse Cotton-Mouton effect--the induction of static magnetization via linearly polarized light. We find that the direction of the induced magnetization is determined by the N\'eel vector. Moreover, its magnitude exhibits a periodic dependence on the polarization angle of the incident light, a hallmark of the system's symmetry. Our findings demonstrate that the inverse Cotton-Mouton effect provides both a method of manipulating altermagnetic magnetization in altemagnets and a probe of their intrinsic properties.
@article{arxiv.2509.08254,
title = {Nonlinear opto-magnetic signature of d-wave altermagnets},
author = {Lijun Yang and Long Liang},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2509.08254},
year = {2025}
}