Date: August 31, 2018
Time: 1:30-2:30pm
Location: PSB 160/161
Speaker: Yasumasa Takano (University of Florida)
Abstract: Spin triangles as building blocks of a new multiferroic
Multiferroics, materials in which both magnetic dipole moments and electric
dipoles are simultaneously ordered, are attracting interest of a growing number of
physicists and material scientists because of their fascinating properties and
potential applications in electronics.
The great majority of multiferroics identified or synthesized to date rely on the
Dzyaloshinskii-Moriya interaction–the asymmetric part of exchange interaction
that arises from spin-orbit coupling–or a structural change involving atomic
displacements. However, a totally new mechanism for multiferroicity, involving
spin triangles, have been proposed in the last decade by Bulaevskii and
collaborators and by Kamiya and Batista. I will describe a first realization of this
mechanism, in an organic molecular crystal, and explain underlying physics —
geometric frustration.
