Optical signatures of bulk g-wave altermagnetism in MnTe

Abstract

For planar d-wave altermagnets, it has been shown that a spin polarization can be induced in a controlled fashion by ultrashort-pulse excitation, even though the material is magnetically compensated. Here, we theoretically analyze the response of the prototypical bulk $g$-wave altermagnet $\hat{I}\pm$-MnTe to linearly polarized ultrashort pulses. We demonstrate how the electronic spin response in $\hat{I}\pm$-MnTe exhibits different symmetry characteristics by calculating the excited electron distributions based on ab initio band structure data. These characteristics depend not only on the nodal planes of the bulk g-wave altermagnet, but also on the excitation pulse. We present a simple procedure to analyze the excited-state characteristics via two-dimensional cuts through the three-dimensional Brillouin zone, which can be used as guidance to present-day magneto-optical techniques.