English

P-wave magnets

Mesoscale and Nanoscale Physics 2024-08-01 v3

Abstract

The p-wave Cooper-pairing instability in superfluid 3^{3}He, characterized by a parity-breaking excitation gap, is regarded as one of the most rich and complex phenomena in physics. The possibility of a counterpart unconventional p-wave ordering of interacting fermions, in which a Fermi surface spontaneously breaks the parity symmetry, has been an open problem for many decades. Here we identify the realization of the counterpart of p-wave superfluidity in magnetism. We demonstrate a strong parity-breaking and anisotropic symmetry lowering of spin-polarized and time-reversal symmetric Fermi surfaces in a representative p-wave magnet CeNiAsO. As a direct experimental signature we predict a large spontaneous anisotropy of the resistivity. Abundant and robust realizations of the unconventional p-wave magnetism can be identified from suitable non-relativistic crystal-lattice and spin symmetries, without requiring strong correlations and extreme external conditions. This opens new prospects in fields ranging from topological phenomena to spintronics.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2309.01607,
  title  = {P-wave magnets},
  author = {Anna Birk Hellenes and Tomáš Jungwirth and Rodrigo Jaeschke-Ubiergo and Atasi Chakraborty and Jairo Sinova and Libor Šmejkal},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2309.01607},
  year   = {2024}
}

Comments

6 pages, 3 figures

R2 v1 2026-06-28T12:12:16.166Z