Abstract
The crystal and magnetic structures of multiferroic were investigated by temperature and magnetic-field-dependent specific heat, susceptibility, and neutron diffraction experiments on single crystals. Considering only the two nearest-neighbor magnetic interactions, the system forms a magnetic chain, but more extended interactions are sizable. Two different magnetic phases exhibiting long-range incommensurate order evolve at and . First, a spin-density wave develops with moments lying in the plane. In its multiferroic phase below exhibits a spiral arrangement with an additional spin component along . Therefore, the inverse Dzyaloshinskii-Moriya mechanism fully explains the multiferroic behavior in this material. A partially unbalanced multiferroic domain distribution was observed even in the absence of an applied electric field. For both phases only a slight temperature dependence of the incommensurability was observed, and there is no commensurate phase emerging at low temperature or at finite magnetic fields up to . thus exhibits a simple phase diagram with the typical sequence of transitions for a type-II multiferroic material.
1 More- Received 23 November 2020
- Accepted 25 March 2021
DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevB.103.134412
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