Wednesday, October 31, 2012

1210.7879 (I. V. Solovyev)

Why is MnWO4 multiferroic?    [PDF]

I. V. Solovyev
MnWO4 is typically regarded as a canonical example of multiferroic material, where the multiferroic activity is caused by a spin-spiral alignment. We argue that, in reality, in MnWO4 there are two sources of the spin-spirality. One is the Dzyaloshinskii-Moriya (DM) interactions. Due to the inversion operation, that connects two Mn sublattices, the DM interactions alone would favor opposite spin chirality in different sublattices. Another source is the isotropic exchange interactions, which favor the same chirality in both magnetic sublattices. Thus, there is a conflict of DM and isotropic exchange interactions, which makes these two sublattices inequivalent and, therefore, breaks the inversion symmetry. Our theoretical analysis is based on the low-energy model, derived from the first-principles electronic structure calculations.
View original: http://arxiv.org/abs/1210.7879

No comments:

Post a Comment