Spontaneous emergence of altermagnetism in the single-orbital extended Hubbard model
Phys. Rev. B 113, 245117 – Published 8 June, 2026
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1103/k5vw-c9ks
Abstract
Altermagnetism (AM), the recently discovered third class of collinear magnetic order, is characterized by a nonrelativistic momentum-dependent spin-split electronic structure with compensated zero net magnetization. It can arise from the conventional antiferromagnetism by introducing local anisotropy on the two opposite-spin sublattices, either through structural changes in local crystallographic symmetry or spontaneous emergence of local staggered orbital order from electron correlations in multi-orbital systems. Here, we demonstrate on the two-dimensional square lattice that a -wave AM can emerge spontaneously in the single-orbital extended Hubbard model, without invoking crystallographic anisotropy and multi-orbital physics. We carry out mean-field studies on the concrete single-orbital model, with and the on-site and nearest-neighbor Coulomb interactions, obtaining the mean-field ground states, analyzing their properties, and determining the phase diagram in the plane. The -wave AM with interesting spin-transport behavior is found to be stabilized in a wide region of the phase diagram when the system is doped away from half filling, actualized by the coexistence of on-site antiferromagnetic order and complex -wave nearest-neighbor spin bond orders. Our findings provide an alternative route to achieve AM and substantially expand the range of candidate AM materials.