Month: December 2023

A joint publication with Jairo Sinova and Libor Šmejkal about crystal magnons in altermagnets has been published in Physical Review Letters.

They theoretically demonstrate a new class of magnons on a prototypical d-wave altermagnet
RuO2 with the compensated antiparallel magnetic order in the ground state. Based on density-functional-theory calculations they observe that the THz-range magnon bands in RuO2 have an alternating chirality splitting, similar to the alternating spin splitting of the electronic bands, and a linear magnon dispersion near the zero wave vector. They also show that, overall, the Landau damping of this metallic altermagnet is suppressed due to the spin-split electronic structure, as compared to an artificial antiferromagnetic phase of the same RuO2 crystal with spin-degenerate electronic bands and chirality-degenerate magnon bands.

A joint publication with Libor Šmejkal and Rafeal González-Hernández about the Anomalous Hall Effect in in doped AgCrSe2 has been published in Advanced Science.

They report the observation of a spontaneous AHE in doped AgCrSe2, a layered polar semiconductor with an antiferromagnetic coupling between Cr spins in adjacent layers. The anomalous Hall resistivity is comparable to the largest observed in compensated magnetic systems to date, and is rapidly switched off when the angle of an applied magnetic field is rotated to ≈80° from the crystalline c-axis. The ionic gating experiments show that the anomalous Hall conductivity magnitude can be enhanced by modulating the p-type carrier density. They also present theoretical results that suggest the AHE is driven by Berry curvature due to noncollinear antiferromagnetic correlations among Cr spins, which are consistent with the previously suggested magnetic ordering in AgCrSe2. Their results open the possibility to study the interplay of magnetic and ferroelectric-like responses in this fascinating class of materials.

A joint publication with Jairo Sinova and Libor Šmejkal about the influence of magnetism, strain, and pressure on the band topology of EuCd2As2 has been published in Physical Review B.

They analyze the role of the delicate interplay of Eu magnetism, strain, and pressure on the realization of nontrivial topological phases. For that they invoke a combination of a group theoretical analysis with ab initio density functional theory calculations and uncover a rich phase diagram with various nontrivial topological phases beyond a Weyl semimetallic state, such as axion and topological crystalline insulating phases, and discuss their realization.