Saturated and Anisotropic Magnetostriction in an Altermagnet
Magnetostriction, a fundamental phenomenon bridging magnetism and mechanics, has enabled a broad spectrum of applications. For almost two centuries, it has been mainly investigated for ferromagnets. Regarding the magnetostriction of antiferromagnets (AFMs), limitedly known examples for both conventional collinear AFMs and noncollinear AFMs predominantly exhibit nonsaturating magnetic-field dependence. Herein, we report an easily saturated magnetostriction effect in a prototypical altermagnet─MnTe, which is an emerging class of collinear AFMs with special crystal symmetries. For high-quality MnTe single crystals, the magnetostriction saturates under a moderate field of ∼0.7 T with an intriguing 2-fold-symmetry anisotropy. First-principles calculations reveal that the saturated and anisotropic magnetostriction originates from symmetry-allowed coupling between elastic strain and its Néel order parameter. These findings break the traditional wisdom on antiferromagnetic magnetostriction.
Authors
- X Wang (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0009-0006-7225-4677)
- J Q Li
- Qi Xu (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6512-0631)
- Peixin Qin (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0009-0009-8889-3205)
- Sixu Jiang (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0009-0003-8626-601X)
- Y.‐L. He
- Guojian Zhao (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0009-0004-7868-5094)
- Zhiyuan Duan (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0009-0007-0138-7437)
- Wenhui Duan (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-9685-2547)
- Zhiqi Liu (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7538-4879)
- Chengbao Jiang (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-3914-1567)
- Yong Xu (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-4844-2460)
- Li Liu
- Ziang Meng
- Xiaoyang Tan
- Qinghua Zhang
- Peizhe Tang (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6345-5809)
Institutions
- Chinese Academy of Sciences (CN)
- Analysis and Testing Centre (CN)
- FZU ‒ Institute of Physics of the Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic (CZ)
- Center for Free-Electron Laser Science (DE)
- Max Planck Institute for the Structure and Dynamics of Matter (DE)
- Kementerian Pendidikan Malaysia (MY)
- National Laboratory for Superconductivity (CN)
- State Key Laboratory of Low-Dimensional Quantum Physics
- Beihang University (CN)
- Tsinghua University (CN)
Publication Details
- Journal
- Journal of the American Chemical Society
- Published
- 2026-05-28
- DOI
- https://doi.org/10.1021/jacs.6c02730
- Primary Topic
- Multiferroics and related materials
- Type
- article
- Field-Weighted Citation Impact
- 0.00
Funders
- National Natural Science Foundation of China
- Beijing Municipal Natural Science Foundation
- National Key Research and Development Program of China
- Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities