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Multiferroics: a magnetic twist for ferroelectricity

Nature Materials volume 6, pages 13–20 (2007)Cite this article

Abstract

Magnetism and ferroelectricity are essential to many forms of current technology, and the quest for multiferroic materials, where these two phenomena are intimately coupled, is of great technological and fundamental importance. Ferroelectricity and magnetism tend to be mutually exclusive and interact weakly with each other when they coexist. The exciting new development is the discovery that even a weak magnetoelectric interaction can lead to spectacular cross-coupling effects when it induces electric polarization in a magnetically ordered state. Such magnetic ferroelectricity, showing an unprecedented sensitivity to ap plied magnetic fields, occurs in 'frustrated magnets' with competing interactions between spins and complex magnetic orders. We summarize key experimental findings and the current theoretical understanding of these phenomena, which have great potential for tuneable multifunctional devices.

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Figure 1: Ferroelectricity in charge-ordered systems.
Figure 2: High magnetic tunability of magnetic ferroelectrics.
Figure 3: Temperature dependence of the inverse magnetic susceptibility of magnetically frustrated materials.
Figure 4: Frustrated spin chains with the nearest-neighbour FM and next-nearest-neighbour AFM interactions J and J′.
Figure 5: Effects of the antisymmetric Dzyaloshinskii–Moriya interaction.
Figure 6: Spiral and non-spiral magnetic ferroelectrics.

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Acknowledgements

We thank Y. J. Choi, Y. Horibe, D. I. Khomskii, S. Y. Park and P. Radaelli for discussions, and A. F. Garcia-Flores, E. Granado and T. Kimura for providing figures. S.W.C. was supported by the National Science Foundation-MRSEC. M.M. acknowledges support by the MSCplus program, DFG (Mercator fellowship), and the hospitality of Cologne University.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Rutgers Center for Emergent Materials and Department of Physics & Astronomy, 136 Frelinghuysen Road, Piscataway, 08854, New Jersey, USA

    Sang-Wook Cheong

  2. Laboratory of Pohang Emergent Materials and Department of Physics, Pohang University of Science and Technology, Pohang, 790-784, Korea

    Sang-Wook Cheong

  3. Materials Science Center, University of Groningen, Nijenborgh 4, Groningen, 9747 AG, The Netherlands

    Maxim Mostovoy

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Cheong, SW., Mostovoy, M. Multiferroics: a magnetic twist for ferroelectricity. Nature Mater 6, 13–20 (2007). https://doi.org/10.1038/nmat1804

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