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Materials science

A desirable wind up

Nature volume 454, pages 591–592 (2008)Cite this article

A Correction to this article was published on 10 September 2008

Multiferroic materials have complex domain structures that make precise interpretation of their behaviours difficult. The creation and study of a single-domain multiferroic crystal is thus an exciting development.

The terms multiferroic and magnetoelectric are often confused. Materials are multiferroic if they have both spontaneously ordered magnetic (ferromagnets or antiferromagnets) and electrical dipole moments (ferroelectrics). However, spontaneous order is not required for the two dipole species to exhibit magnetoelectric coupling, a phenomenon that enables materials to interconvert magnetic and electrical signals. Most multiferroic materials are expected to display some form of magnetoelectric coupling, but the formation of multiple magnetic and electrical domains complicates the analysis of magnetoelectric effects. Writing in Physical Review Letters, Lebeugle et al.1 report on the multiferroic and magnetoelectric properties of single crystals of bismuth ferrite (BiFeO3) that contain just one electrical and magnetic domain — possibly because the crystals were made at low enough temperatures to be ferroelectric once formed.

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Figure 1: Electrical control of ferromagnetic films.

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  1. Neil Mathur is in the Department of Materials Science, New Museums Site, Pembroke Street, Cambridge CB2 3QZ, UK. ndm12@cam.ac.uk,

    Neil Mathur

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Mathur, N. A desirable wind up. Nature 454, 591–592 (2008). https://doi.org/10.1038/454591a

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