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It was recently reported that the double tungstate LiFe(WO₄)₂ exhibits a multiferroic phase for which the driving mechanism is based on inverse Dzyaloshionskii-Moriya interaction [1]. LiFe(WO₄)₂ is thus beside MnWO₄ only the second multiferroic material in the family of tungstates. Moreover, this system possesses in contrast to related MnWO₄ a simple phase diagram without commensurate phases that interfere with the multiferroic domain dynamics. So far nuclear and magnetic structure investigations were done only on polycrystalline samples. Here we report on our single crystal studies on LiFe(WO₄)₂ and the respective nuclear and magnetic structure determination. Both magnetic phases in LiFe(WO₄)₂ were investigated by neutron diffraction experiments, which revealed a spin-density wave as an intermediate phase and a low-temperature chiral magnetic structure inducing the multiferroic behavior. Furthermore, neutron polarization analysis shows that an unbalanced multiferroic domain distribution develops even in the absence of external fields.
[1] Liu et al. Phys. Rev. B 95, 195134 (2017)