  Important phenomena such as magnetostriction, magnetocaloric, and
magnetoelectric effects arise from, or could be enhanced by, the coupling of
magnetic and structural degrees of freedom. The coupling of spin and lattice
also influence transport and structural properties in magnetic materials in
particular around phase transitions. In this paper we propose a method for
screening materials for a strong magneto-structural coupling by assessing the
effect of the local magnetic configuration on the atomic forces using density
functional theory (DFT). We have employed the disordered local moment approach
in a supercell formulation to probe different magnetic local configurations and
their forces and performed a high-throughput search on binary and ternary
compounds available in the Crystallographic Open Database. We identify a list
of materials with a strong spin-lattice coupling out of which several are
already known to display magneto-lattice coupling-phenomena like Fe3O4 and CrN.
Others, such as Mn2CrO4 and CaFe7O11 have been less studied and are yet to
reveal their potentials in experiments and applications.
