Spin Space Symmetry Without Spin Space Groups
Abstract
Spin space groups provide a complete symmetry classification of magnetic structures in the non-relativistic limit and have become an increasingly useful language for organizing magnetic phases and their physical properties. Each spin space group with a given parent space group is specified, up to spin-only symmetries, by a real representation of that space group acting in spin space. We argue that working directly with this representation not only avoids the construction and identification of the group, but also organizes and simplifies the resulting symmetry constraints on allowed responses. Determining the presence or absence of magnetic compensation, piezomagnetism, spin and charge transport, the Edelstein effect, and momentum-space spin textures becomes an ordinary problem in the representation theory of space groups. The resulting conditions reduce to overlaps between the three exterior powers of the defining representation and multipole representations of the point group. Several physically distinct responses then reduce to the same condition on the defining representation. For example, a p-wave spin texture and the time-even Edelstein effect are allowed under the same condition, as are piezomagnetism and a d-wave spin texture in compensated order. The wave-vector content of the exterior powers gives a further hierarchy of selection rules: depending on the relevant power, a uniform response requires one, two, or three ordering wave vectors to sum to a reciprocal lattice vector. These rules can exclude many responses before point-group symmetry is considered. We illustrate the approach with examples drawn from a wide variety of materials hosting collinear, coplanar and non-coplanar magnetic order. Finally, we discuss extensions of these results to magnetic space groups, connections to Landau theories of collinear order, and the characterization of odd-parity magnets.
Related
- Type-II quantum spin Hall insulator without time-reversal symmetry
- Projective symmetry groups beyond spin-1/2: Classifying integer-spin quantum spin liquids
- Spin splitting without symmetry: a nearly compensated ferrimagnet and the origin of altermagnetism
- Automated Generation of Commensurate Magnetic Structures based on Spin Space Groups and Graph Theory
- Projective representation theory of spin space groups
BibTeX
@misc{rau2026spin,
title = {{Spin Space Symmetry Without Spin Space Groups}},
author = {Jeffrey G. Rau},
howpublished = {arXiv},
year = {2026},
month = oct,
doi = {10.48550/arxiv.2610.37770},
eprint = {2610.37770},
archivePrefix = {arXiv},
url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.37770},
note = {CC BY 4.0},
}
RIS
TY - UNPB
TI - Spin Space Symmetry Without Spin Space Groups
AU - Jeffrey G. Rau
PY - 2026
DA - 2026/10/27
PB - arXiv
DO - 10.48550/arxiv.2610.37770
UR - https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.37770
AB - Spin space groups provide a complete symmetry classification of magnetic structures in the non-relativistic limit and have become an increasingly useful language for organizing magnetic phases and their physical properties. Each spin space group with a given parent space group is specified, up to spin-only symmetries, by a real representation of that space group acting in spin space. We argue that working directly with this representation not only avoids the construction and identification of the group, but also organizes and simplifies the resulting symmetry constraints on allowed responses. Determining the presence or absence of magnetic compensation, piezomagnetism, spin and charge transport, the Edelstein effect, and momentum-space spin textures becomes an ordinary problem in the representation theory of space groups. The resulting conditions reduce to overlaps between the three exterior powers of the defining representation and multipole representations of the point group. Several physically distinct responses then reduce to the same condition on the defining representation. For example, a p-wave spin texture and the time-even Edelstein effect are allowed under the same condition, as are piezomagnetism and a d-wave spin texture in compensated order. The wave-vector content of the exterior powers gives a further hierarchy of selection rules: depending on the relevant power, a uniform response requires one, two, or three ordering wave vectors to sum to a reciprocal lattice vector. These rules can exclude many responses before point-group symmetry is considered. We illustrate the approach with examples drawn from a wide variety of materials hosting collinear, coplanar and non-coplanar magnetic order. Finally, we discuss extensions of these results to magnetic space groups, connections to Landau theories of collinear order, and the characterization of odd-parity magnets.
ER -