A publication with Jairo Sinova, Libor Šmejkal, Helen Gomonay and Rodrigo Jaeschke on the structure, control, and dynamics of altermagnetic textures has been published in npj Spintronics.
They present a phenomenological theory of altermagnets, that captures their unique magnetization dynamics and allows modeling magnetic textures in this new magnetic phase. Focusing on the prototypical d-wave altermagnets, e.g., RuO2, they can explain intuitively the characteristic lifted degeneracy of their magnon spectra, by the emergence of an effective sublattice-dependent anisotropic spin stiffness arising naturally from the phenomenological theory. They show that as a consequence the altermagnetic domain walls, in contrast to antiferromagnets, have a finite gradient of the magnetization, with its strength and gradient direction connected to the altermagnetic anisotropy, even for 180° domain walls. This gradient generates a ponderomotive force in the domain wall in the presence of a strongly inhomogeneous external magnetic field, which may be achieved through magnetic force microscopy techniques. The motion of these altermagentic domain walls is also characterized by an anisotropic Walker breakdown, with much higher speed limits of propagation than ferromagnets but lower than antiferromagnets.