A ferrotoroidic candidate with well-separated spin chains

TL;DR

This paper reports Ba6Cr2S10 as a rare ferrotoroidic candidate with well-separated quasi-1D spin chains, exhibiting antiferromagnetic-like order and multiple ferroic orders, opening new avenues for ferrotoroidicity research.

Contribution

It introduces Ba6Cr2S10 as a novel ferrotoroidic candidate with a unique dimerized spin chain structure and multiple ferroic orders, based on experimental structural and magnetic analysis.

Findings

Ba6Cr2S10 exhibits antiferromagnetic-like order at ~10 K.

The structure contains dimerized face-sharing CrS6 octahedral chains.

The material allows ferromagnetic, ferroelectric, and ferrotoroidic orders.

Abstract

The search of novel quasi one-dimensional (1D) materials is one of the important aspects in the field of material science. Toroidal moment, the order parameter of ferrotoroidic order, can be generated by a head-to-tail configuration of magnetic moment. It has been theoretically proposed that one-dimensional (1D) dimerized and antiferromagnetic-like spin chain hosts ferrotoroidicity and has the toroidal moment composed of only two antiparallel spins. Here, we report a ferrotoroidic candidate of Ba6Cr2S10 with such a theoretical model of spin chain. The structure consists of unique dimerized face-sharing CrS6 octahedral chains along the c axis. An antiferromagnetic-like ordering at ~10 K breaks both space- and time-reversal symmetries and the magnetic point group of mm'2' allows three ferroic orders in Ba6Cr2S10: (anti)ferromagnetic, ferroelectric and ferrotoroidic orders. Our investigation reveals that Ba6Cr2S10 is a rare ferrotoroidic candidate with quasi 1D spin chain, which can be considered as a starting point for the further exploration of the physics and applications of ferrotoroidicity.