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  • Letter
  • Open Access

Bulk photovoltaic effects in altermagnets

Motohiko Ezawa

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Phys. Rev. B 111, L201405 – Published 20 May, 2025

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevB.111.L201405

Abstract

The bulk photovoltaic effect is a photocurrent generation from alternating electric field, which is a promising candidate for future efficient solar cell technology. It is the second-order optical current, which is the injection current or the shift current. We focus on the direct current generation. By employing a simple two-band model of the d-wave altermagnet coupled with the Rashba interaction, we show that the linearly polarized light can generate the injection and shift currents when the Néel vector points to an in-plane direction. The magnitude of the injection current is almost constant over a wide range of the frequency ω of the applied light provided it is smaller than a certain critical frequency ωc and larger than the bulk gap energy ɛgap, ɛgap<ℏω<ℏωc. Hence, the use of the injection current is quite efficient for solar cell technology because any photon whose energy is within this range can be equally utilized.

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Phys. Rev. B 111, L201405– Published 20 May, 2025
  • Received 20 December 2024
  • Revised 22 March 2025
  • Accepted 5 May 2025
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Published by the American Physical Society under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license. Further distribution of this work must maintain attribution to the author(s) and the published article's title, journal citation, and DOI.

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