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.
@article{arxiv.2201.08601,
title = {A ferrotoroidic candidate with well-separated spin chains},
author = {Jun Zhang and Xiancheng Wang and Long Zhou and Gangxiu Liu and Devashibhai T. Adroja and Ivan da Silva and Franz Demmel and Dmitry Khalyavin and Jhuma Sannigrahi and Hari S. Nair and Lei Duan and Jianfa Zhao and Zeng Deng and Runze Yu and Xi Shen and Richeng Yu and Hui Zhao and Jimin Zhao and Youwen Long and Zhiwei Hu and Hong-Ji Lin and Ting-Shan Chan and Chien-Te Chen and Wei Wu and Changqing Jin},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2201.08601},
year = {2022}
}