Related papers: Tilt-driven antiferroelectricity in PbZrO$_3$
Crystalline materials with broken inversion symmetry can exhibit a spontaneous electric polarization, which originates from a microscopic electric dipole moment. Long-range polar or anti-polar order of such permanent dipoles gives rise to…
Antiferroelectrics have potential applications in energy conversion and storage, but are scarce, particularly among oxides that otherwise display rich ferroic behaviours. Are we overlooking potential antiferroelectrics, simply because we…
Proximity ferroelectricity has recently been reported as a new design paradigm for inducing ferroelectricity, where a non-ferroelectric polar material becomes a ferroelectric by interfacing with a thin ferroelectric layer. Strongly polar…
Bismuth ferrite is one of the most widely studied multiferroic materials because of its large ferroelectric polarisation coexisting with magnetic order at room temperature. Using density functional theory (DFT), we identify several…
Whereas ferroelectricity may vanish in ultra-thin ferroelectric films, it is expected to emerge in ultra-thin anti-ferroelectric films, sparking people's interest in using antiferroelectric materials as an alternative to ferroelectric ones…
The coupling of spin and valley physics is nowadays regarded as a promising route toward next-generation spintronic and valleytronic devices. In the aim of engineering functional properties for valleytronic applications, we focus on the…
Ferroelectric domain walls are a rich source of emergent electronic properties and unusual polar order. Recent studies showed that the configuration of ferroelectric walls can go well beyond the conventional Ising-type structure. N\'eel-,…
Lead-free antiferroelectric perovskite $\rm AgNbO_3$ is nowadays attracting extensive research interests due to its promising applications in energy storage. Although great progress has been made in optimizing the material performance,…
We uncover a new pathway towards multiferroicity, showing how magnetism can drive ferroelectricity without relying on inversion symmetry breaking of the magnetic ordering. Our free-energy analysis demonstrates that any commensurate…
Within Landau theory, magnetism and polarity are homotopic, displaying a one-to-one correspondence between most physical characteristics. However, despite widely reported noncollinear magnetism, spontaneous noncollinear electric dipole…
We study from first-principles calculations the ferroelectric structural phase transition of Pb$_5$Ge$_3$O$_{11}$ crystal. The calculations of phonons and Born effective charges of the paraelectric phase allow us to identify a polar…
We put forward double perovskites of the R$_2$NiMnO$_6$ family (with $R$ a rare-earth atom) as a new class of multiferroics on the basis of {\it ab initio} density functional calculations. We show that changing $R$ from La to Y drives the…
First-principles calculations are presented for the layered perovskite Ca$_3$Mn$_2$O$_7$. The results reveal a rich set of coupled structural, magnetic and polar domains in which oxygen octahedron rotations induce ferroelectricity,…
The octahedron tilt transitions of ABX_3 perovskite-structure materials lead to an anti-polar (or antiferroelectric) arrangement of dipoles, with the low temperature structure having six sublattices polarized along various crystallographic…
Within the broad class of multiferroics (compounds showing a coexistence of magnetism and ferroelectricity), we focus on the subclass of "improper electronic ferroelectrics", i.e. correlated materials where electronic degrees of freedom…
The presence of a switchable spontaneous electric polarization makes ferroelectrics ideal candidates for the use in many applications such as memory and sensors devices. Since known ferroelectrics are rather limited, finding new…
The first switchable electric polarization in metals was recently discovered in bilayer and trilayer WTe2. Strangely, despite the tininess of the ordered polarization, the ferroelectricity survives up to 350 K, rendering the mechanism of…
Ferroelectricity in hafnia is often regarded as a breakthrough discovery in ferroelectrics, potentially able to revolutionize the whole field. Despite increasing interests, a comprehensive understanding of the many factors driving the…
The electronic and structural properties of Li$B$O$_3$ ($B$=V, Nb, Ta, Os) are investigated via first-principles methods. We show that Li$B$O$_3$ belong to the recently proposed hyperferroelectrics, i.e., they all have unstable longitudinal…
Pyroelectric current and magnetoelectric coupling measurements on polycrystalline samples of the quadruple perovskite (LaMn$_{3}$)Mn$_{4}$O$_{12}$ give evidence of ferroelectricity driven by the antiferromagnetic ordering of the $B$-site…