Ferroelectrics and multiferroics articles within Nature Physics

Featured

  • News & Views |

    Electric dipoles are common in insulators, but extremely rare in metals. This situation may be about to change, thanks to flexoelectricity.

    • Gustau Catalan

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Electric polarization is well defined for insulators but not for metals. Electric-like polarization is now realized via inhomogeneous lattice strain in metallic SrRuO3, generating a pseudo-electric field. This field affects the material’s electronic bands.

    • Wei Peng
    • , Se Young Park
    •  & Daesu Lee

  • News & Views |

    The guiding of magnetic fields by soft ferromagnetic solids is well known and exploited in magnetic shielding applications. Now, ferroelectric nematic liquids are shown to analogously guide electric fields.

    • Alenka Mertelj

  • Article |

    The ferroelectric uniaxial nematic liquid-crystal phase features a freely reorientable polarization field. When confined in microchannels and subjected to electric fields, this polarization is now found to align with the channels due to a superscreening effect.

    • Federico Caimi
    • , Giovanni Nava
    •  & Tommaso Bellini

  • Letter
    | Open Access

    A scanning nitrogen-vacancy microscope is used to image ferroelectric domains in piezoelectric and improper ferroelectric samples with high sensitivity. The technique relies on the nitrogen-vacancy’s Stark shift produced by the samples’ electric field.

    • William S. Huxter
    • , Martin F. Sarott
    •  & Christian L. Degen

  • News & Views |

    Optical control of material properties is usually limited to the region that absorbs the light. Coupling to lattice vibrations that travel close to the speed of light allows ultrafast modulation of polarization deep inside a ferroelectric material.

    • Elsa Abreu

  • Perspective |

    The interaction between light and the crystal lattice of a quantum material can modify its properties. Utilizing nonlinear interactions allows this to be done in a controlled way to design specific non-equilibrium functionalities.

    • Ankit S. Disa
    • , Tobia F. Nova
    •  & Andrea Cavalleri

  • News & Views |

    The ferromagnetism of iron has been known for millennia. Now a rotational form of spontaneous crystallographic ordering has been discovered. This touches upon fundamental questions about the relation between symmetry, structure and order in matter.

    • Manfred Fiebig

  • Research Highlight |

    • David Abergel

  • Article |

    A spectroscopic study of strontium titanate provides a method for transferring the vibrational energy of a low-frequency phonon mode to higher-frequency modes, with the potential to access elusive ‘silent’ modes.

    • M. Kozina
    • , M. Fechner
    •  & M. C. Hoffmann

  • Letter |

    Pump–probe measurements of CuB2O4 reveal non-reciprocal directional dichroism, demonstrating the possibility to optically induce magnetoelectricity in a material on a femtosecond timescale.

    • D. Bossini
    • , K. Konishi
    •  & M. Kuwata-Gonokami

  • Review Article |

    Topology and collective phenomena give quantum materials emergent functions that provide a platform for developing next-generation quantum technologies, as surveyed in this Review.

    • Yoshinori Tokura
    • , Masashi Kawasaki
    •  & Naoto Nagaosa

  • Article |

    Nanoscale ferroelectricity is hard to characterize. Studies of BaTiO3 thin films now reveal a close coupling between the ferroelectric and the surface electrochemical states — a notion important for future applications of ferroelectric nanomaterials.

    • Sang Mo Yang
    • , Anna N. Morozovska
    •  & Sergei V. Kalinin

  • News & Views |

    Ferroelectricity and superconductivity do not have much in common. Now, a superconducting and a ferroelectric-like state have been found to coexist in a doped perovskite oxide.

    • Marc Gabay
    •  & Jean-Marc Triscone

  • News & Views |

    The coexistence of spin order and disorder at a critical point in the phase diagram of multiferroic materials may be exploited to locally control magnetoelectric coupling — as is now shown for doped BiFeO3 by means of scanning probe microscopy.

    • Sergei V. Kalinin

  • News & Views |

    The physical properties of ice are governed by its tetrahedral network of hydrogen bonds and the ice rules that determine the distribution of the protons. Deviations from the tetrahedral structure and violations of these rules can lead to surprising phenomena, such as the ferroelectric state now reported for thin films of epitaxial ice.

    • Ivan A. Ryzhkin

  • Article |

    A combination of nonlinear optical experiments, piezoresponse force microscopy and Monte Carlo simulations resolves the correlation between polarization, topology and temperature for the hexagonal manganite YMnO3—a persistent ferroelectrics puzzle.

    • Martin Lilienblum
    • , Thomas Lottermoser
    •  & Manfred Fiebig

  • Commentary |

    Magnetocaloric and electrocaloric effects are driven by doing work, but this work has barely been explored, even though these caloric effects are being exploited in a growing number of prototype cooling devices.

    • Xavier Moya
    • , Emmanuel Defay
    •  & Neil D. Mathur

  • News & Views |

    The metallic sheet at the heterointerface between two different insulating and non-magnetic oxides displays seemingly conflicting ferromagnetic properties that may be explained by the presence of a spiral magnetic structure.

    • Marc Gabay
    •  & Jean-Marc Triscone

  • News & Views |

    Most multiferroic materials are antiferromagnets, yet ferromagnetism can be induced in bismuth ferrite by substrate-induced strain. Strain is now shown to afford useful control of the orientation of magnetic moments in the multiferroics.

    • Annemieke M. Mulders

  • Letter |

    Chirality is usually manifested by differences in a material’s response to left- and right-circularly polarized light. This difference is the result of the specific distribution of charge within chiral materials. A similar response has now been found to result from the chiral spin structure of an antiferromagnet.

    • S. Bordács
    • , I. Kézsmárki
    •  & Y. Tokura

  • Article |

    The ability to modify a material’s magnetization with an electric field could enable lower-power electronic devices. Such ‘magnetoelectric’ behaviour is usually only seen at the interface between magnetostrictive and electrostrictive materials, but has now been observed in the bulk of single-component rare-earth ferrites.

    • Yusuke Tokunaga
    • , Yasujiro Taguchi
    •  & Yoshinori Tokura

  • News & Views |

    Atomic-resolution differential phase-contrast imaging using aberration-corrected scanning transmission electron microscopy now provides a sensitive probe of the electric field associated with individual atoms.

    • Peter D. Nellist

  • Letter |

    A technique capable of detecting the electric field associated with individual atoms is now demonstrated. Atomic-resolution differential phase-contrast imaging using aberration-corrected scanning transmission electron microscopy provides a sensitive probe of the gradient of the electrostatic potential in a crystal lattice.

    • Naoya Shibata
    • , Scott D. Findlay
    •  & Yuichi Ikuhara

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