Saturation of the anomalous Hall effect at high magnetic fields in altermagnetic RuO2
Teresa Tschirner, Philipp Keßler, R. D. Gonzalez Betancourt, Tommy Kotte, Dominik Kriegner, B. Büchner, Joseph Dufouleur, M. Kamp, Vedran Jovic, Libor Šmejkal, Jairo Sinova, R. Claessen, T. Jungwirth, Simon Moser, Helena Reichlová, Louis Veyrat
Abstract
Observations of the anomalous Hall effect in RuO2 and MnTe have demonstrated unconventional time-reversal symmetry breaking in the electronic structure of a recently identified new class of compensated collinear magnets, dubbed altermagnets. While in MnTe, the unconventional anomalous Hall signal accompanied by a vanishing magnetization is observable at remanence, the anomalous Hall effect in RuO2 is excluded by symmetry for the Néel vector pointing along the zero-field [001] easy-axis. Guided by a symmetry analysis and ab initio calculations, a field-induced reorientation of the Néel vector from the easy-axis toward the [110] hard-axis was used to demonstrate the anomalous Hall signal in this altermagnet. We confirm the existence of an anomalous Hall effect in our RuO2 thin-film samples, whose set of magnetic and magneto-transport characteristics is consistent with the earlier report. By performing our measurements at extreme magnetic fields up to 68 T, we reach saturation of the anomalous Hall signal at a field Hc ≃ 55 T that was inaccessible in earlier studies but is consistent with the expected Néel-vector reorientation field.