Antiferromagnetic (AFM) materials are robust to external magnetic perturbation due to the absence of net magnetic moment, which also eliminates spin splitting in the band structures. Altermagnetism provides a route to resurrect the spin-split bands in a collinear symmetry-compensated antiferromagnet with special magnetic space group. Here we propose an alternative mechanism to achieve spin splitting in a two-dimensional (2D) Janus A-type AFM material. Since the built-in electric field intrinsic to the Janus structure creates a layer-dependent electrostatic potential, the electronic bands in different layers stagger to produce the spin-splitting effect, resulting in the electric potential difference antiferromagnetism (EPD-AFM). We demonstrate that Janus monolayer ${\mathrm{Mn}}_2\mathrm{ClF}$ is a candidate material for achieving EPD-AFM by first-principles calculations. We further show that the spin splitting in EPD-AFM can be tuned by the piezoelectric effect. This work reveals a different class of 2D AFM materials with spin polarization.

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• Electronic structure
• Magnetism
• Piezoelectricity