Colour symmetry and altermagnetic-like spin textures in noncollinear antiferromagnets

TL;DR

This paper introduces a colour symmetry formalism to analyze spin textures in non-collinear antiferromagnets, revealing invariant components analogous to altermagnets, supported by theoretical and DFT calculations.

Contribution

It develops a novel colour symmetry approach to identify invariant spin texture components in non-collinear antiferromagnets, independent of spin-orbit coupling.

Findings

Identifies a rotation-invariant spin texture component in non-collinear antiferromagnets.

Demonstrates the approach on Mn3Ir, Pb2MnO4, and Mn3GaN.

Validates predictions with density functional theory calculations.

Abstract

We present a formalism based on colour symmetry to analyse the momentum-space spin textures of non-collinear antiferromagnets. We show that, out of the spin textures allowed by the magnetic point group, \textcolor{\altcolor} {one can extract a component that is invariant by general rotations in spin space, and can exist in the absence of spin-orbit coupling, in complete analogy to spin textures in altermagnets}. We demonstrate this approach in the case of three complex, non-collinear magnets, Mn$_3$Ir(Ge,Si), Pb$_2$MnO$_4$ and Mn$_3$GaN. For Mn$_3$GaN, we also show that the predictions of colour-symmetry analysis are consistent with density functional theory calculations performed on the same system both with and without spin-orbit coupling.