Altermagnetic materials and how you can also design them

DIPC Seminars

Speaker: Marc Vila Tusell
Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory
When: 2025/07/15
12:00
Place: DIPC Josebe Olarra Seminar Room
Host: Fernando De Juan
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Altermagnetic materials and how you can also design them

The topic of altermagnets, a recently discovered magnetic phase distinct from ferromagnetism and antiferromagnetism, has recently gained tremendous attention for the new physics present in these magnetic materials, as well as their potential impact in next-generation, low-power electronics. Altermagnetism is ubiquitous in nature, encompassing many types of materials: from simple metals and insulators to multiferroics, organic materials, superconductors and even cold atom systems. While their unique properties can be understood in terms of group theory, in this talk, I will explain how one can also describe these materials with a language more commonly used by solid state physicists and material scientists, such as the nature of chemical bonds, crystal field distortions and orbital hybridizations. I will show how my work in developing intuitive theoretical models can give us invaluable insights into how the electronic degrees of freedom – charge, spin, orbital and lattice – intertwine with each other in altermagnets. Such insights not only allow us to understand these materials in a very transparent way, but also predict unique phenomena, including signatures in magneto-optical experiments. Importantly, I will demonstrate that these models can be applied to more complex materials, as verified by first principles calculations and experiments, thus bringing the physics we learned from minimal models to real materials. Finally, I will also show how we can utilize this knowledge to design and engineer altermagnetism in more complex systems such as domain walls of multiferroic materials.

Zoom: https://dipc-org.zoom.us/j/96006206467