Symmetry Analysis of Magnetoelectric Coupling Effect in All Point Groups

Abstract

Symmetry analysis provides crucial insights into the magnetoelectric coupling effect in type-II multiferroics. In this Letter, we comprehensively investigate couplings between electric polarization and inhomogeneous magnetization across all 32 crystallographic point groups using a phenomenological Landau theory. Our theory successfully explains the ferroelectric polarizations in all known type-II multiferroics characterized by incommensurate magnetic orders. In addition, we predict 12 promising type-II multiferroic candidates with the highest magnetic transition temperature of 84 K through systematic screening of MAGNDATA database. Furthermore, we find that the collinear spin-sinusoidal texture emerges as a previously unrecognized source of ferroelectric polarization. We also demonstrate that topological ferroelectric vortex states can be induced by ferromagnetic vortex configurations in uniaxial point groups, opening a route to realizing coexisting multiple-vortex states in multiferroics.