Altermagnetic band geometry and the antiferromagnetic thermal boundary in a coupled fermion-Ising model
Phys. Rev. B 114, 235135 – Published 29 October, 2026
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1103/f873-q422
Abstract
We study a minimal square-lattice model to examine the relation between momentum-space altermagnetic band geometry and real-space Ising criticality in a coupled fermion-Ising setting. In this model, itinerant fermions with explicitly spin-dependent nearest-neighbor hopping are locally coupled to transverse-field Ising moments. The hopping anisotropy parameter tunes a -type altermagnetic band geometry in momentum space, whereas the transverse field controls real-space antiferromagnetic (AFM) fluctuations and drives the finite-temperature AFM–paramagnetic (PM) transition of the Ising sector. Using determinant quantum Monte Carlo simulations, we show for the representative case studied in detail, , that the momentum-space band-geometry fingerprint remains visible in the coupled system: the spin-resolved occupation imbalance displays a sign-changing structure that follows the underlying spin-split Fermi-surface geometry. By contrast, finite-size scaling of the staggered Ising order parameter indicates that, in the representative comparison between and , the extracted thermal critical fields remain numerically close on the scale resolved by our finite-size analysis at both and . We argue that this separation reflects the coexistence of a tunable momentum-space altermagnetic band geometry with the nesting structure of the half-filled nearest-neighbor bare kinetic term, which remains an important constraint on the AFM channel in this benchmark. Our results show that, in this controlled setting, a visible altermagnetic band-geometry fingerprint in momentum space need not imply a comparably large shift of the collective real-space magnetic phase boundary.