Ferroaxial moment induced by vortex spin texture

Abstract

The nature of an electric ferro-axial moment characterizing a time-reversal-even axial-vector quantity is theoretically investigated under magnetic orderings. We clarify that a vortex spin texture results in the emergence of the ferro-axial moment depending on the helicity. By introducing a multipole description, we show that the ferro-axial nature appears when two types of odd-parity magnetic multipoles become active under the vortex spin texture: One is the magnetic monopole and the other is the magnetic toroidal dipole. We present all the magnetic point groups to possess the ferro-axial moment in the presence of the magnetic orderings with the magnetic monopole and magnetic toroidal dipole. Moreover, we specifically consider a multi-orbital model in a four-sublattice tetragonal system to demonstrate the ferro-axial moment induced by the vortex spin texture. We show that the ferro-axial moment is microscopically characterized by both the cluster-scale and atomic-scale axial-vector quantities: The former is described by the vortex of the local electric dipole and the latter is represented by the outer product of the local orbital and spin angular momenta. Moreover, we find that the atomic-spin orbit coupling and the hybridization between orbitals with different parity are key ingredients to induce the ferro-axial moment. We also apply the result to a magnetic skyrmion with a topologically-nontrivial spin texture and discuss candidate materials.