Novel concepts for anisotropic Heisenberg modelling of multiferroic oxides

Hexagonal manganites are oxides, in which structural, electronic, and magnetic degrees of freedom are coupled in a complex manner. Therefore, such materials have the potential for novel, nanoscale sensing and switching applications. Manganites are composed of dense-packed hexagonal manganese oxide layers with strong in-plane and weak interlayer coupling, thus the possible spin configurations may be studied with the help of a two-dimensional model Hamiltonian. Special focus is directed to the efficient sampling of the configuration space at low temperatures and concepts for improved importance sampling will be discussed.