RKKY interaction in Rashba altermagnets

Abstract

The interaction between two impurity spins provides vital information about the host system and has been suggested to form a building block in quantum computation and spintronic devices. We here determine this Ruderman-Kittel-Kasuya-Yosida (RKKY) interaction in recently discovered altermagnetic materials, including the presence of a Zeeman field, in a two- and three-dimensional altermagnet. In two dimensions, we also study the effect of Rashba spin-orbit coupling. Our results reveal that the momentum-resolved spin-polarization of the itinerant carriers in the altermagnet changes the RKKY interaction qualitatively from the isotropic spin-splitting in a ferromagnet. The Ising-contribution directed parallel with the altermagnetism is found to exhibit a beating pattern reflecting the shape of the Fermi surface of the system and may thus be further influenced by an out-of-plane Zeeman field. However, the exchange interaction for in-plane impurity spins deviates only slightly from that of a normal metal. On shorter length scales, we find that the Ising, the Dzyaloshinskii-Moriya terms, and other non-collinear interaction terms in the RKKY interaction acquire a rapidly oscillating behavior as a function of the relative angle between the impurity spins, which is not present in the ferromagnetic case. We determine how this new length scale depends on the system parameters analytically. Our results show that the RKKY interaction in altermagnets is qualitatively different from that of ferromagnets despite both breaking time-reversal symmetry.

7 pages, 4 figures

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• Interface-induced magnetization in altermagnets and antiferromagnets
• Intrinsic nonlinear conductivity induced by quantum geometry in altermagnets and measurement of the in-plane Néel vector
• Out-of-plane Edelstein effects: Electric-field induced magnetization in $p$-wave magnets
• Field-sensitive dislocation bound states in two-dimensional $d$-wave altermagnets
• Magnetic impurities in an altermagnetic metal
• Quantum geometry and elliptic optical dichroism in $p$-wave magnets
• Non-linear anomalous Edelstein response at altermagnetic interfaces
• Chiral crossroads in $\mathrm{H}{\mathrm{o}}_3\mathrm{Sc}{\mathrm{O}}_6$: a tale of frustration in maple leaf lattice
• Spin Currents in Rashba Altermagnets: From Equilibrium to Nonlinear Regimes
• Electric field controlled second-order anomalous Hall effect in altermagnets
• Josephson effects in the spin-triplet superconductor/altermagnet/spin-triplet superconductor junctions: the detection of the intrinsic $\mathbf{d}$-vector