ArXiv · 2026
Over the past few years, altermagnets have emerged as a new class of collinear magnets with broken time-reversal symmetry, offering novel opportunities for spintronics beyond conventional magnets. Rather than from net magnetization, as in ferromagnets, the unconventional time-reversal symmetry breaking of altermagnets originates from antiferroic magnetic dipoles locked to higher-order multipoles. Here we report the direct visualization of a g-wave altermagnetic multipole in the canonical altermagnet CrSb. Combining high-energy synchrotron X-ray diffraction with valence electron density (VED) analysis, we uncover a pronounced directional anisotropy of the VED distribution alternating between Cr sublattices. This evidences the antiferroic order of electric hexadecapoles predicted in g-wave altermagnets. Its coexistence with antiferroic magnetic dipoles induces ferroic magnetic multipoles, as probed by polarized neutron diffraction. We further identify a microscopic model of altermagnetism that directly relates the g-wave multipole and the g-wave spin splitting. Through direct observation and quantification of multipoles, this study provides a real-space fingerprint of altermagnetism and establishes a general probe of hidden multipole order in quantum materials.
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