Cheong Sang-Wook, Mostovoy Maxim
Rutgers Center for Emergent Materials and Department of Physics & Astronomy, 136 Frelinghuysen Road, Piscataway 08854, New Jersey, USA.
Nat Mater. 2007 Jan;6(1):13-20. doi: 10.1038/nmat1804.
Magnetism and ferroelectricity are essential to many forms of current technology, and the quest for multiferroic materials, where these two phenomena are intimately coupled, is of great technological and fundamental importance. Ferroelectricity and magnetism tend to be mutually exclusive and interact weakly with each other when they coexist. The exciting new development is the discovery that even a weak magnetoelectric interaction can lead to spectacular cross-coupling effects when it induces electric polarization in a magnetically ordered state. Such magnetic ferroelectricity, showing an unprecedented sensitivity to ap plied magnetic fields, occurs in 'frustrated magnets' with competing interactions between spins and complex magnetic orders. We summarize key experimental findings and the current theoretical understanding of these phenomena, which have great potential for tuneable multifunctional devices.
磁性和铁电性对于许多当前技术形式至关重要，而对多铁性材料的探索具有重大的技术和基础意义，在这种材料中这两种现象紧密耦合。铁电性和磁性往往相互排斥，当它们共存时相互作用较弱。令人兴奋的新进展是发现，即使是微弱的磁电相互作用，当它在磁有序状态下诱导出电极化时，也能导致惊人的交叉耦合效应。这种磁铁电性，对施加的磁场表现出前所未有的敏感性，出现在具有自旋间竞争相互作用和复杂磁序的“受挫磁体”中。我们总结了这些现象的关键实验发现和当前的理论理解，它们在可调谐多功能器件方面具有巨大潜力。
