SPICE Workshop on Ferrons and Magnons: friends or foes? July 7th - 9th, 2026
Dominik Juraschek
We introduce multiferrons as elementary excitations with both electric and magnetic character [1]. Multiferrons cause a tilting and elliptical precession of the polarization and at the same time create a magnetization through the mechanism of dynamical multiferroicity. Using density functional theory calculations for LiNbO3, we show that the electric polarization of multiferrons is perpendicular to the equilibrium ferroelectric polarization, whereas the magnetization is parallel to it. We further show that multiferrons carry net electric and magnetic quadrupole and octupole moments, which we call multipolons. These multipolons could couple to internal multipolar degrees of freedom, for example in altermagnets, or to external probes such as neutrons, potentially leading to experimentally observable phenomena following the excitation of multiferrons with light and thermal gradients.
[1] Pols, Romao, and Juraschek, Phys. Rev. Lett. 136, 166801 (2026)