2005/03/16 by G. Lawes, A. B. Harris, T. Kimura +11 · 15 citations
Materials Science · Physics and Astronomy · #Advanced Condensed Matter Physics #Magnetic and transport properties of perovskites and related materials #Multiferroics and related materials #cond-mat.mtrl-sci
paper · pdf · doi:10.1103/physrevlett.95.087205
published as Phys. Rev. Lett. 95, 087205 (2005) · 11 pages, 3 figures
arxiv created 2005/03/16 · openalex publication_date 2005/08/19 · arxiv updated 2009/12/01 · openalex created_date 2016/06/24 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
We show that long-range ferroelectric and incommensurate magnetic order appear simultaneously in a single phase transition in Ni3V2O8. The temperature and magnetic-field dependence of the spontaneous polarization show a strong coupling between magnetic and ferroelectric orders. We determine the magnetic symmetry using Landau theory for continuous phase transitions, which shows that the spin structure alone can break spatial inversion symmetry leading to ferroelectric order. This phenomenological theory explains our experimental observation that the spontaneous polarization is restricted to lie along the crystal b axis and predicts that the magnitude should be proportional to a magnetic order parameter.