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Ferroelectrics and multiferroics are a class of materials that exhibit switching of their physical properties under an external influence. Ferroelectrics demonstrate a switchable electric polarization when an electric field is applied. Multiferroics exhibit a similar ‘ferroic’ behaviour in two or more of their (usually electric, magnetic or elastic) properties.
The authors realize voltage-based magnetization switching and reading in nanodevices at room temperature, through exchange coupling between multiferroic BiFeO3 and ferromagnetic CoFe, for writing, and spin-to-charge current conversion between CoFe and Pt, for reading.
Sliding ferroelectricity occurs in stacks of van der Waals materials. Depending on the particular stacking, the system can host a spontaneous polarization, and under an applied electric field, polarization domain walls will propagate transverse to the electric field. Here, Yang et al use an optical approach to directly observe this sliding of domain walls in bilayer MoS2.
The stacking of freestanding ferroelectric perovskite layers with controlled twist angles results in a peculiar pattern of polarization vortices and antivortices that emerges from the flexoelectric coupling of polarization to strain gradients.
By forming a heterostructure interface, and by judicious choice of crystallographic orientation, piezoelectrics are developed that show expansion or contraction along all axes on application of an electric field.
By inserting an epitaxial in-plane buffer layer of Bi5FeTi3O15, an artificial flux closure architecture enables ferroelectric polarization from a single unit cell of BaTiO3 or BiFeO3.
An article in Nature Electronics reports the integration of a ferroelectric gate with a transition metal dichalcogenide heterostructure in a device that can work both as a reconfigurable logic switch and as a neuromorphic device.
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.