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Materials physics

Reactive walls

Nature volume 515, pages 348–350 (2014)Cite this article

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Domain walls are natural borders in ferromagnetic, ferroelectric or ferroelastic materials. It seems that they can also be reactive areas that produce crystallographic phases never before observed in bulk materials. See Letter p.379

Interfaces between different oxide materials have been attracting much attention. They are seen as a source of new properties and functionalities. Engineering these borders has already revealed phenomena such as conductivity and superconductivity at the frontier between insulating compounds, and magnetism between non-magnetic materials1. In fact, it is not even necessary to combine different materials to create interfaces. Ferroic materials such as ferromagnets, ferroelectrics and ferroelastics naturally break into domains characterized by different orientations of the material's spontaneous ferroic order — magnetization for ferromagnets, electric polarization for ferroelectrics and macroscopic deformation for ferroelastics. These domains are separated by interfaces called domain walls2. On page 379 of this issue, Farokhipoor et al.3 highlight that, instead of being a passive region that accommodates the different ferroic-order orientations of the domains that border it, a domain wall can also be a reactive area that generates and stabilizes new two-dimensional crystallographic phases not achievable by conventional means.

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Figure 1: Atomic motions and domain-wall structure.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Philippe Ghosez is in the Unit of Theoretical Materials Physics, Université de Liège, B-4000 Sart Tilman, Belgium.,

    Philippe Ghosez

  2. Jean-Marc Triscone is in the Department of Condensed Matter Physics, Université de Genève, CH-1211 Geneva, Switzerland.,

    Jean-Marc Triscone

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  1. Philippe Ghosez
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  2. Jean-Marc Triscone
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Correspondence to Philippe Ghosez or Jean-Marc Triscone.

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Ghosez, P., Triscone, JM. Reactive walls. Nature 515, 348–350 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1038/515348a

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