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Phys. Rev. Lett. 95, 087205 (2005) [4 pages]

Magnetically Driven Ferroelectric Order in Ni3V2O8

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G. Lawes1,*, A. B. Harris2, T. Kimura1, N. Rogado3,†, R. J. Cava3, A. Aharony4, O. Entin-Wohlman4, T. Yildirim5, M. Kenzelmann5,6, C. Broholm5,6, and A. P. Ramirez1,7
1Los Alamos National Laboratory, Los Alamos, New Mexico 87545, USA
2Department of Physics and Astronomy, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, 19104, USA
3Department of Chemistry and Princeton Materials Institute, Princeton University, Princeton, New Jersey 08544, USA
4School of Physics and Astronomy, Raymond and Beverly Sackler Faculty of Exact Sciences, Tel Aviv University, Tel Aviv 69978, Israel
5NIST Center for Neutron Research, Gaithersburg, Maryland 20899, USA
6Department of Physics and Astronomy, Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, Maryland 21218, USA
7Bell Labs, Lucent Technologies, 600 Mountain Avenue, Murray Hill, New Jersey 07974, USA

Received 21 March 2005; published 19 August 2005

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.

© 2005 The American Physical Society

URL:
http://link.aps.org/doi/10.1103/PhysRevLett.95.087205
DOI:
10.1103/PhysRevLett.95.087205
PACS:
75.80.+q, 75.10.−b, 75.25.+z

*Present address: Department of Physics, Wayne State University, Detroit, MI 48201.

†Present address: DuPont Research and Development, Experimental Station, Wilmington, DE 19880.

 
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