SPICE Workshop on Ferrons and Magnons: friends or foes? July 7th - 9th, 2026
Ping Tang
Ferromagnets and ferroelectrics are ferroic materials that exhibit spontaneous order of magnetic and electric dipoles below a critical temperature, respectively. The collective elementary excitations of ferroic orders can be described as quasiparticles that transport energy as well as reduced order parameters. Magnons, the quanta of spin-wave excitations, have been extensively studied in the field of spintronics as carriers of spin angular momentum, giving rise to the spin Seebeck and Peltier effects in magnetic insulators. By contrast, their electric analogues in ferroelectrics, termed "ferrons" [1, 2], have been proposed by us. Ferrons are predicted to enable electric-dipole transport [3,4], electric-field control of thermal currents [5,6], and nonlocal drag thermoelectricity [7]. Recent experiments report the observation of coherent [8, 9] and incoherent [10] ferrons generated by optical and electrical stimuli, respectively. In this talk, I will introduce the concept of ferrons and discuss the prospects of the emerging field of “ferronics" [11], where ferrons offer new mechanisms and functionalities for information and energy transport.
References:
[1] P. Tang et al., Phys. Rev. B 106, L081105 (2022).
[2] P. Tang et al., Phys. Rev. B 109, L060301 (2024).
[3] G. E. W. Bauer et al., Phys. Rev. Lett. 126, 187603 (2021).
[4] P. Tang et al., Phys. Rev. Lett. 128, 047601 (2022).
[5] B. L Wooten et al., Science Advances 9 eadd7194 (2023).
[6] G. Zhao et al., arXiv:2501.17833 (2025).
[7] P. Tang et al., Phys. Rev. B 107, L121406 (2023).
[8] J. Choe et al., arXiv:2505.22559 (2025).
[9] B. Zhang et al., arXiv:2509.06057 (2025).
[10] K. Shen et al., arXiv:2505.24419 (2025).
[11] G. Bauer et al., Phys. Rev. Appl. 20, 050501 (2023).