Electric control of spin states in frustrated triangular molecular magnets

Frustrated triangular molecular magnets are a very important class of magnetic molecules since the absence of inversion symmetry allows an external electric field to couple directly with the spin chirality that characterizes their ground state. The spin-electric coupling in these molecular magnets leads to an efficient and fast method of manipulating spin states, making them an exciting candidate for quantum information processing. The efficiency of the spin-electric coupling depends on the spin-induced electric-dipole moment of the frustrated spin configurations contributing to the chiral ground state. In this paper, we report on first-principles calculations of spin-electric coupling in a {V3} triangular magnetic molecule. We have explicitly calculated the spin-induced charge redistribution within the magnetic centers that is responsible for the spin-electric coupling. Furthermore, we have generalized the method of calculating the strength of the spin-electric coupling to calculate any triangular spin-1/2 molecule with C3 symmetry and have applied it to calculate the coupling strength in {V15} molecular magnets.