Multiferroic clusters: a new perspective for relaxor-type room-temperature multiferroics
Abstract
Multiferroics are promising for sensor and memory applications, but despite all efforts invested in their research no single-phase material displaying both ferroelectricity and large magnetization at room-temperature has hitherto been reported. This situation has substantially been improved in the novel relaxor ferroelectric single-phase , where polar nanoregions (PNR) transform into static-PNR (SPNR) as evidenced by piezoresponse force microscopy (PFM) and simultaneously enable congruent multiferroic clusters (MFC) to emerge from inherent ferrimagnetic Bi(Fe,Co)O3 regions as verified by magnetic force microscopy (MFM) and secondary ion mass spectrometry (SIMS). On these MFC, exceptionally large direct and converse magnetoelectric coupling coefficients, at room-temperature, were measured by PFM and MFM respectively. We expect the non-ergodic relaxor properties which are governed by the Bi0.5K0.5TiO3 component to play a vital role in the strong ME coupling, by providing an electrically and mechanically flexible environment to MFC. This new class of non-ergodic relaxor multiferroics bears great potential for applications. Especially the prospect of a ME nanodot storage device seems appealing.
Cite
@article{arxiv.1602.08348,
title = {Multiferroic clusters: a new perspective for relaxor-type room-temperature multiferroics},
author = {Leonard F. Henrichs and Oscar Cespedes and James Bennett and Joachim Landers and Soma Salamon and Christian Heuser and Tim Helbig and Oliver Gutfleisch and Doru C. Lupascu and Heiko Wende and Wolfgang Kleemann and Andrew J. Bell},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1602.08348},
year = {2016}
}
Comments
Pre-peer review version. Neutron diffraction data are missing with respect to final article