2010/10/28 by Sinisa Coh, David Vanderbilt, Andrei Malashevich +1 · 4 citations
Materials Science · Physics and Astronomy · #Advanced Condensed Matter Physics #Multiferroics and related materials #Topological Materials and Phenomena #cond-mat.mtrl-sci
paper · pdf · doi:10.1103/physrevb.83.085108
published as Phys. Rev. B 83, 085108 (2011) · 13 pages, 8 figures, 1 table
arxiv created 2010/10/28 · openalex publication_date 2011/02/23 · arxiv updated 2012/05/16 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/04
We present a Wannier-based method to calculate the Chern-Simons orbital magnetoelectric coupling in the framework of first-principles density-functional theory. In view of recent developments in connection with strong ℤ2 topological insulators, we anticipate that the Chern-Simons contribution to the magnetoelectric coupling could, in special cases, be as large or larger than the total magnetoelectric coupling in known magnetoelectrics, such as Cr2O3. The results of our calculations for the ordinary magnetoelectrics Cr2O3, BiFeO3, and GdAlO3 confirm that the Chern-Simons contribution is quite small in these cases. On the other hand, we show that, if the spatial-inversion and time-reversal symmetries of the ℤ2 topological insulator Bi2Se3 are broken by hand, large induced changes appear in the Chern-Simons magnetoelectric coupling.