The high Curie temperature multiferroic compound, CuO, has a quasidegenerate magnetic ground state that makes it prone to manipulation by the so called ``order-by-disorder'' mechanism. First principle computations supplemented with Monte Carlo simulations and experiments show that isovalent doping allows to stabilize the multiferroic phase in non-ferroelectric regions of the pristine material phase-diagram with experiments reaching a 250% widening of the ferroelectric temperature window with 5% of Zn doping. Our results allow to validate the importance of a quasidegenerate ground state on promoting multiferroicity on CuO at high temperatures and open a path to the material engineering of new multiferroic materials.
@article{arxiv.1403.2529,
title = {Tuning order-by-disorder multiferroicity in CuO by doping},
author = {J. Hellsvik and M. Balestieri and T. Usui and A. Stroppa and A. Bergman and L. Bergqvist and D. Prabhakaran and O. Eriksson and S. Picozzi and T. Kimura and J. Lorenzana},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1403.2529},
year = {2015}
}