Research Projects

Material science researchers are focusing on oxide-based double perovskite (DP) materials, such as A2BB'O6, which exhibit various properties such as exotic magnetism, metallicity, half-metallicity, TEP, magnetoresistance, MCE, and multiferroicity. These compounds offer a vast treasure of unexplored DP compounds with numerous potential applications. In some DP, magnetism induces ferroelectricity, which is postulated to be due to a special arrangement of magnetic spins, as determined by neutron diffraction (ND) studies. However, it is unclear how magnetism leads to the breaking of spatial inversion symmetry, leading to polarization and ferroelectricity. The presence of an incommensurate magnetic order along the c-direction could have better explained ferroelectricity. ND is a powerful technique to decipher spin arrangement of magnetic ions and can provide microscopic insight about polyhedral bond-lengths and bond angles. The researchers plan to investigate the R2MnMO6 DP series to decipher the mechanism responsible for the origin of ferroelectricity using in-depth temperature and magnetic field dependent ND studies. systematic experiments, such as temperature dependent magnetization, ND under external magnetic field, specific heat, AC susceptibility, and pyroelectric current and dielectric studies, will be conducted using in-house facilities. The results will be analyzed to comprehend structural conditions, especially incommensurate longitudinal magnetic order, in which magnetism leads to the breaking of spatial inversion symmetry. This will help establish a correlation between structure and physical properties, primarily magnetism, polarization/ferroelectric, and dielectric.