Evidence of large magneto-dielectric effect coupled to a metamagnetic transition in Yb2CoMnO6

The double perovskite Yb2CoMnO6 has been synthesized with an almost perfect checkerboard arrangement of Co2+ and Mn4+ cations in the B-sublattice of the perovskite cell. It presents an anomaly in the electric capacitance and a strong magneto-dielectric effect at about 40K whose interplay with the microscopic magnetic behavior has been investigated by means of neutron diffraction, magnetization, pyroelectric, and relative dielectric permittivity measurements. We show that the onset of an E-type antiferromagnetic ordering of Co2+ and Mn4+ moments monitored by neutron diffraction provokes the noticeable jump of the relative dielectric permittivity (similar to 9%) at about 40 K. It is also shown that this jump can be totally suppressed by application of a magnetic field of mu H-0 = 5 T. Neutron experiments and magnetic measurements confirm that such a suppression leading to a significant magneto-dielectric effect is driven by a metamagnetic phase transition from the peculiar E-type ordering of 3d moments into a collinear ferromagnetic order. Pyroelectric current measurements do not show any spontaneous electric polarization, so the large dielectric anomaly at zero field cannot be ascribed to a ferroelectric ordering. (C) 2015 AIP Publishing LLC.