| speaker: | Amnon Aharony Department of Physics, Ben Gurion University |
| time: | Friday, November 16, 10:50 - 11:15 |
Multiferroics display simultaneous magnetic and ferroelectric order. Often, the magnetism is partly frustrated, resulting in several commesurate and incommensurate magnetic phases. Ferroelectricity, which breaks inversion symmetry, arises only in some of these phases. Here I present a symmetry based theory, which supplies to tools for analyzing various scenarios leading to multiferroic behavior. Specifically, this approach is demonstrated for the orthorhombic family RMn2O5, where different rare earths R yield slightly different sequences of ordered phases.
Work in collaboration with A. Brooks Harris and Ora Entin-Wohlman.