A publication with Jairo Sinova, Libor Šmejkal, Anna B. Hellenes, Rodrigo Jaeschke Ubiergo and Venkata K. Bharadwaj about supercell altermagnets has been published in Physical Review B.
They substantially broaden the family of altermagnetic candidates by predicting supercell altermagnets. Their magnetic unit cell is constructed by enlarging the nonmagnetic primitive unit cell, resulting in a nonzero propagation vector for the magnetic structure. This connection of the magnetic configuration to the ordering of sublattices gives an extra degree of freedom to supercell altermagnets, which can allow for the control over the order parameter spatial orientation. They identify realistic candidates MnSe2 with a d-wave order, and RbCoBr3, CsCoCr3, and BaMnO3 with g-wave order. They demonstrate the reorientation of the order parameter in MnSe2, which has two different magnetic configurations, whose energy difference is only 5 meV, opening the possibility of controlling the orientation of the altermagnetic order parameter by external perturbations.