Katsura-Nagaosa-Balatsky magnetoelectricity in molecular magnets: Bipartite entanglement transfer by means of rotating electric field

Abstract

We investigate quantum entanglement in a spin-1/2 Heisenberg trimer with spin-induced electric polarization described by the Katsura-Nagaosa-Balatsky (KNB) mechanism in the presence of external magnetic and electric fields. The electric field is assumed to lie in the plane of the magnetic ions, allowing its strength and orientation to be tuned independently. We analyze both bipartite and tripartite entanglement and demonstrate that the spin-electric-field coupling provides an efficient mechanism for controlling quantum correlations within the molecular nanomagnet. Depending on the electric-field parameters, the bipartite entanglement can be significantly enhanced or suppressed, while the multipartite entanglement exhibits a rich dependence on the microscopic spin-electric coupling. Most notably, we demonstrate that a rotating in-plane electric field of constant magnitude induces a controllable transfer of bipartite entanglement between different spin pairs. In the symmetric case of homogeneous exchange interactions and uniform KNB coupling, this transfer is found to be nearly ideal, with the bipartite negativity approaching its theoretical maximum for one spin pair while simultaneously vanishing for the remaining pairs. We show that the efficiency of the transfer can be tailored through the exchange interactions, bond geometry, and nonuniform spin-electric coupling. These results establish molecular nanomagnets with KNB spin-electric coupling as a promising platform for the electrical manipulation, steering, and localization of quantum entanglement at the molecular scale.