Spin-split collinear antiferromagnets: a large-scale ab-initio study
Abstract
It was recently discovered that, depending on their symmetries, collinear antiferromagnets can actually break the spin degeneracy in momentum space, even in the absence of spin-orbit coupling. Such systems, recently dubbed altermagnets, are signalled by the emergence of a spin-momentum texture set mainly by the crystal and magnetic structure, relativistic effects playing a secondary role. Here we consider all collinear =0 antiferromagnetic compounds in the MAGNDATA database allowing for spin-split bands. Based on density-functional calculations for the experimentally reported crystal and magnetic structures, we study more than sixty compounds and introduce numerical measures for the average momentum-space spin splitting. We highlight some compounds that are of particular interest, either due to a relatively large spin splitting, such as CoF and FeSOF, or because of their low-energy electronic structure. The latter include LiFeF, which hosts nearly flat spin-split bands next to the Fermi energy, as well as RuO, CrNbS, and CrSb, which are spin-split antiferromagnetic metals.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.2207.07592,
title = {Spin-split collinear antiferromagnets: a large-scale ab-initio study},
author = {Yaqian Guo and Hui Liu and Oleg Janson and Ion Cosma Fulga and Jeroen van den Brink and Jorge I. Facio},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2207.07592},
year = {2024}
}