Related papers: Tilt-driven antiferroelectricity in PbZrO$_3$
Under a sufficiently high applied electric field, a non-polar antiferroelectric material, such as \ce{PbZrO3}, can undergo a rapid transformation to a polar ferroelectric phase. While this behavior is promising for energy storage and…
Novel phenomena appear when two different oxide materials are combined together to form an interface. For example, at the interface of LaAlO3/SrTiO3, two dimensional conductive states form to avoid the polar discontinuity and magnetic…
Flexoelectricity (coupling between polarization and strain gradients) is a property of all dielectric materials that has been theoretically known for decades, but it is only relatively recently that it has begun to attract experimental…
Interaction between dipoles often emerges intriguing physical phenomena, such as exchange bias in the magnetic heterostructures and magnetoelectric effect in multiferroics, which lead to advances in multifunctional heterostructures.…
Density functional calculations are performed to study the effect of epitaxial strain on PbZrO3. We find a remarkably small energy difference between the epitaxially strained polar R3c and nonpolar Pbam structures over the full range of…
Ferroelectric HfO$_2$ has emerged as a highly promising material for high-density nonvolatile memory and nanoscale transistor applications. However, the uncertain origin of polarization in HfO$_2$ limits our ability to fully understand and…
A detailed investigation of the out-of-plane electrical properties of charge-ordered alpha-(BEDT-TTF)2I3 provides clear evidence for ferroelectricity. Similar to multiferroic alpha-(BEDT-TTF)2Cu[N(CN)2]Cl, the polar order in this material…
Recently, the perovskite BiCoO$_3$ has been shown experimentally to be isostructural with PbTiO$_3$, while simultaneously the $d^6$ Co$^{3+}$ ion has a high spin ground state with $C$-type antiferromagnetic ordering. Using hybrid density…
Antiferroelectrics, which host both polar and antipolar order parameters, are characterized by the double hysteresis loops which are advantageous for various applications such as high-density energy storage. In this study, we investigate…
Antiferroelectrics have been recently sparking interest due to their potential use in energy storage and electrocaloric cooling. Their main distinctive feature is antiferroelectric switching, i.e. the possibility to induce a phase…
Hyperferroelectrics are receiving a growing interest thanks to their unique property to retain a spontaneous polarization even in presence of a depolarizing field. Nevertheless, general microscopic mechanisms driving hyperferroelectricity,…
The phenomenon of the spontaneous electric polarization (ferro- and antiferroelectricity) is one of the fundamental problems of the solid-state physics. Although, there has been lot of experimental and theoretical progress, still needs to…
Using first-principles density functional theory we predict a ferroelectric ground state -- driven by off-centering of the magnetic Mn$^{4+}$ ion -- in perovskite-structure BaMnO$_3$. Our finding is surprising, since the competition between…
The possibility of reconciliation between seemingly mutually exclusive properties in one system can not only lead to theoretical breakthroughs but also potential novel applications. The research on the coexistence of two purportedly…
Density functional calculations are performed to investigate the experimentally-reported field-induced phase transition in thin-film ZrO2 (J. Muller et al., Nano. Lett. 12, 4318). We find a small energy difference of ~ 1 meV/f.u. between…
Large electron-electron Coulomb-interactions in correlated systems can lead to a periodic arrangement of localized electrons, the so called "charge-order". The latter is here proposed as a driving force behind ferroelectricity in iron…
The ground-state structural and electronic properties of ferroelectric BiFeO$_3$ are calculated using density functional theory within the local spin-density approximation and the LSDA+U method. The crystal structure is computed to be…
Metal-organic frameworks comprehend a wide class of hybrid organic-inorganic materials with general structure A$_m$BX$_n$, with $A$ and $X$ being organic molecules and B a metal cation. This often results in enhanced structural flexibility…
The question of how ferroelectric polarization is coupled to magnetism in magnetoelectric multiferroics, in which both types of order are simultaneously present, is of considerable scientific and practical interest. A recent Letter…
Using first-principles methods, we predict the energy landscape and ferroelectric states of double perovskites of the form AA$'$BB$'$O$_6$ in which the atoms on both the A and B sites are arranged in rock-salt order. While we are not aware…