Spin-Group Symmetry in Magnetic Materials with Negligible Spin-Orbit Coupling
By Pengfei Liu, Jiayu Li, Jingzhi Han, X. Wan, Qihang Liu. Physical Review X, 2021
224 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Symmetry formulated by group theory plays an essential role with respect to the laws of nature, from fundamental particles to condensed matter systems. Here, by combining symmetry analysis and tight-binding model calculations, we elucidate that the crystallographic symmetries of a vast number of magnetic materials with light elements, in which the neglect of relativistic spin-orbit coupling (SOC) is an appropriate approximation, are considerably larger than the conventional magnetic groups. Thus, a symmetry description that involves partially-decoupled spin and spatial rotations, dubbed as spin group, is required. Spin group permits more symmetry operations and thus more energy degeneracies that are disallowed by the magnetic groups. One consequence of the spin group is the new anti-unitary symmetries that protect SOC-free Z_2 topological phases with unprecedented surface node structures. Our work not only manifests the physical reality of materials with weak SOC, but also shed light on the understanding of all solids with and without SOC by a unified group theory.
Subfields: Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics, Condensed Matter Physics
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/b11ccd8017eed5bd229bd8dc0b3a323b5a6c85e5
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Citations in the corpus
- Two-dimensional altermagnets: Superconductivity in a minimal microscopic model (2023, background): “Consequently, the research on altermagnets carried out so far has been phenomenological [2, 37, 38], through ab initio calculations or experimental work.”
- A metallic room-temperature d-wave altermagnet (2024, unknown): “These two materials are semiconductors with a global band gap at the Fermi level ( E F ) [30-33], limiting their potential applications in spintronics.”
- Topological transition from nodal to nodeless Zeeman splitting in altermagnets (2023, background): “Meanwhile, because of the ubiquitous presence of the SOC, the crystalline environment inevitably restricts the possible directions of the magnetic moments, even when the SOC is weak.”