Altermagnetism Without Crystal Structure

Over the last few years a new form of collinear magnetic order has been proposed, dubbed altermagnetism, which like antiferromagnetism (AFM) has no net magnetisation. Unlike conventional AFM, the two spin sublattices in an altermagnet are related by rotation rather than translation, leading to a spin-splitting in momentum space. Since the definition depends on a notion of rotational symmetry, the search for candidate materials has focussed on crystalline materials -- where the lattice shares the symmetry of the altermagnetic order. Here we study the possibility of altermagnetism emerging as a spontaneously symmetry-broken phase in an amorphous material, and consider the possibility of realising such a phase in currently-available candidate materials.