Strain-engineering spin-valley locking effect in altermagnetic monolayer with multipiezo properties

Abstract: Recently, altermagnetism (AM) in condensed matter systems has attracted much attention due to the physical properties arising from the alternating spins in both real space and reciprocal space. In our work, we propose a stable monolayer Janus Nb2SeTeO with altermagnetic ground state and a new type of spin-valley locking (SVL) effect. The monolayer Janus Nb2SeTeO exhibits a mutipizeo effect with a large out-of-plane piezoelectricity and piezovalley effect with large valley polarization. The piezovalley effect is induced by the uniaxial strain effect in different directions, which contributes the anomalous valley Hall effect (AVHE) in the AM system. Moreover, the compressive uniaxial strain could induce the quantum anomalous Hall effect (QAHE) in the AM system, where the chirality of the dissipationless topological edge states could be manipulated by the direction of uniaxial strain. These manifest topological phase transitions could be realized via the piezovalley effect in the AM system. Furthermore, the AM quantum spin Hall effect (QSHE) could be induced by the biaxial strain effect, which contributes the quantized spin Hall conductance. Our work reveals that strain-engineering technique could provide as an important method to tune the dissipationless edge states in monolayer Janus Nb2SeTeO. By designing the SVL effect could emerge new physics in AM systems, such as AVHE, QAHE and QSHE.