TY - JOUR
T1 - Field-tunable toroidal moment in a chiral-lattice magnet
AU - Ding, Lei
AU - Xu, Xianghan
AU - Jeschke, Harald O.
AU - Bai, Xiaojian
AU - Feng, Erxi
AU - Alemayehu, Admasu Solomon
AU - Kim, Jaewook
AU - Huang, Fei Ting
AU - Zhang, Qiang
AU - Ding, Xiaxin
AU - Harrison, Neil
AU - Zapf, Vivien
AU - Khomskii, Daniel
AU - Mazin, Igor I.
AU - Cheong, Sang Wook
AU - Cao, Huibo
PY - 2021/12/1
Y1 - 2021/12/1
N2 - Ferrotoroidal order, which represents a spontaneous arrangement of toroidal moments, has recently been found in a few linear magnetoelectric materials. However, tuning toroidal moments in these materials is challenging. Here, we report switching between ferritoroidal and ferrotoroidal phases by a small magnetic field, in a chiral triangular-lattice magnet BaCoSiO4 with tri-spin vortices. Upon applying a magnetic field, we observe multi-stair metamagnetic transitions, characterized by equidistant steps in the net magnetic and toroidal moments. This highly unusual ferri-ferroic order appears to come as a result of an unusual hierarchy of frustrated isotropic exchange couplings revealed by first principle calculations, and the antisymmetric exchange interactions driven by the structural chirality. In contrast to the previously known toroidal materials identified via a linear magnetoelectric effect, BaCoSiO4 is a qualitatively new multiferroic with an unusual coupling between several different orders, and opens up new avenues for realizing easily tunable toroidal orders.
AB - Ferrotoroidal order, which represents a spontaneous arrangement of toroidal moments, has recently been found in a few linear magnetoelectric materials. However, tuning toroidal moments in these materials is challenging. Here, we report switching between ferritoroidal and ferrotoroidal phases by a small magnetic field, in a chiral triangular-lattice magnet BaCoSiO4 with tri-spin vortices. Upon applying a magnetic field, we observe multi-stair metamagnetic transitions, characterized by equidistant steps in the net magnetic and toroidal moments. This highly unusual ferri-ferroic order appears to come as a result of an unusual hierarchy of frustrated isotropic exchange couplings revealed by first principle calculations, and the antisymmetric exchange interactions driven by the structural chirality. In contrast to the previously known toroidal materials identified via a linear magnetoelectric effect, BaCoSiO4 is a qualitatively new multiferroic with an unusual coupling between several different orders, and opens up new avenues for realizing easily tunable toroidal orders.
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85114666320&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1038/s41467-021-25657-6
DO - 10.1038/s41467-021-25657-6
M3 - Article
SN - 2041-1723
VL - 12
JO - Nature Communications
JF - Nature Communications
IS - 1
M1 - 5339
ER -