The duality between electric and magnetic dipoles in  electromagnetism only partly applies to condensed matter. In  particular, the elementary excitations of the magnetic and  ferroelectric orders, namely magnons and ferrons, respectively, have  received asymmetric attention from the condensed matter community. I  will introduce and summarize the basic physics of the budding field of  “ferronics” [1] in comparison with the advanced field of magnonics [2]  at the hand of recent developments.

[1] G.E.W. Bauer, P. Tang, R. Iguchi, J. Xiao, K. Shen, Z.  Zhong, T. Yu, S.M. Rezende, J.P. Heremans, and K. Uchida, A  Perspective on Ferrons, submitted to Phys. Rev. Appl.,  https://arxiv.org/submit/4755842 .

[2] T. Yu, C. Cai, and G.E.W. Bauer, Chirality Enables  Thermal Magnon Transistors,?https://arxiv.org/abs/2306.08371

About the speaker:?Gerrit Ernst Wilhem Bauer (born in  1956) was raised in the Münsterland, Germany. He studied chemical  engineering at Twente University in the Netherlands (M.Sc. 1980),  experimental physics at the Hahn-Meitner Institute in Berlin (Ph.D.  1984) and theoretical physics as a JSPS Postdoctoral Fellow at the  University of Tokyo. He spent 6 years at the corporate Philips  Research Laboratories in Eindhoven (NL). He became professor in  Theoretical Physics at Delft University of Technology in 1992, at the  Tohoku University in Japan in 2011, and at the UCAS in China in 2022.  He is presently Chair Professor at the Kavli Institute for Theoretical  Science in Beijing as well as Professor and PI at the Advanced  Institute of Material Science of Tohoku University on a shared basis.  He is a Fellow of the American Physical Society and The Japan Society  of Applied Physics. He received among others the Humboldt Research  Award 2023. His published oeuvre in (mainly) theoretical condensed  matter physics can be found under his Researcher ID F-8273-2010.