SmFeO3 has attracted considerable attention very recently due to the reported multiferroic properties above room-temperature. We have performed powder and single crystal neutron diffraction as well as complementary polarization dependent soft X-ray absorption spectroscopy measurements on floating-zone grown SmFeO3 single crystals in order to determine its magnetic structure. We found a k=0 G-type collinear antiferromagnetic structure that is not compatible with inverse Dzyaloshinskii-Moriya interaction driven ferroelectricity. While the structural data reveals a clear sign for magneto-elastic coupling at the N\'eel-temperature of ~675 K, the dielectric measurements remain silent as far as ferroelectricity is concerned.
@article{arxiv.1412.3029,
title = {k=0 magnetic structure and absence of ferroelectricity in SmFeO3},
author = {C. -Y. Kuo and Y. Drees and M. T. Fernández-Díaz and L. Zhao and L. Vasylechko and D. Sheptyakov and A. M. T. Bell and T. W. Pi and H. -J. Lin and M. -K. Wu and E. Pellegrin and S. M. Valvidares and Z. W. Li and P. Adler and A. Todorova and R. Küchler and A. Steppke and L. H. Tjeng and Z. Hu and A. C. Komarek},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1412.3029},
year = {2014}
}