Libor Šmejkal
Relativistic bandstructure of solids generates functionalities of modern quantum, topological and spintronics materials1. Common collinear antiferromagnets exhibit Kramers spin degenerate bands2 and for many decades were believed to be excluded from spin splitting physics. Our recent prediction of crystal time-reversal symmetry breaking by anisotropic magnetization densities due to the collinear antiferromagnetism combined with nonmagnetic atoms3 changes this perspective. Unlike the conventional spin-orbit interaction induced spin splitting, our antiferromagnetic spin splitting is of exchange origin, can reach giant eV values, and can preserve spin quantum number.
In this talk, we will discuss the basic properties of this new type of antiferromagnetic spin splitting, its local magnetic symmetry origin and symmetry criteria for its emergence and we will catalogue broad class of material candidates. Furthermore, we will show that this antiferromagnetic spin splitting generates a crystal Hall effect controllable via rearrangement of nonmagnetic atoms3. Finally, we will present an experimental discovery of crystal Hall effect in ruthenium dioxide antiferromagnet4.
[2] Šmejkal, L., Železný, J., Sinova, J. & Jungwirth, T. Electric Control of Dirac Quasiparticles by Spin-Orbit Torque in an Antiferromagnet. Phys. Rev. Lett. 118, 106402 (2017), arXiv (2016)
[3] Šmejkal, L., González-Hernández, R., Jungwirth, T. & Sinova, J. Crystal time-reversal symmetry breaking and spontaneous Hall effect in collinear antiferromagnets. Sci. Adv. 6, eaaz8809 (2020), arXiv (2019)
[4] Feng, Z., Zhou, X., Šmejkal, L. et al. Observation of the Crystal Hall Effect in a Collinear Antiferromagnet. arXiv (2020)