Manipulating magnetoelectric energy landscape in multiferroics

Yen-Lin Huang; Dmitri Nikonov; Christopher Addiego; Rajesh V Chopdekar; Bhagwati Prasad; Lei Zhang; Jyotirmoy Chatterjee; Heng-Jui Liu; Alan Farhan; Ying-Hao Chu; Mengmeng Yang; Maya Ramesh; Zi Qiang Qiu; Bryan D Huey; Chia-Ching Lin; Tanay Gosavi; Jorge Íñiguez; Jeffrey Bokor; Xiaoqing Pan; Ian Young; Lane W Martin; Ramamoorthy Ramesh

doi:10.1038/s41467-020-16727-2

Manipulating magnetoelectric energy landscape in multiferroics

Nat Commun. 2020 Jun 5;11(1):2836. doi: 10.1038/s41467-020-16727-2.

Authors

Yen-Lin Huang^{1

2}, Dmitri Nikonov³, Christopher Addiego⁴, Rajesh V Chopdekar⁵, Bhagwati Prasad¹, Lei Zhang¹, Jyotirmoy Chatterjee⁶, Heng-Jui Liu⁷, Alan Farhan⁸, Ying-Hao Chu⁹, Mengmeng Yang¹⁰, Maya Ramesh¹¹, Zi Qiang Qiu¹⁰, Bryan D Huey¹², Chia-Ching Lin³, Tanay Gosavi³, Jorge Íñiguez^{13

14}, Jeffrey Bokor⁶, Xiaoqing Pan^{4

15

16}, Ian Young³, Lane W Martin^{1

2}, Ramamoorthy Ramesh^{17

18

19}

Affiliations

¹ Department of Materials Science and Engineering, University of California, Berkeley, Berkeley, CA, 94720, USA.
² Materials Sciences Division, Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory, Berkeley, CA, 94720, USA.
³ Exploratory Integrated Circuits, Components Research, Intel Corp., Hillsboro, Oregon, 97124, USA.
⁴ Department of Physics and Astronomy, University of California, Irvine, Irvine, CA, 92697, USA.
⁵ Advanced Light Source, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Berkeley, CA, 94720, USA.
⁶ Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences, University of California, Berkeley, Berkeley, CA, 94720, USA.
⁷ Department of Materials Science and Engineering, National Chung Hsing University, Taichung, 402, Taiwan.
⁸ Department of Applied Physics, Aalto University School of Science, Espoo, FI-00076, Finland.
⁹ Department of Materials Science and Engineering, National Chaio Tung University, Hsinchu, 300, Taiwan.
¹⁰ Department of Physics, University of California, Berkeley, Berkeley, CA, 94720, USA.
¹¹ Department of Physics, University of California, Irvine, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064, USA.
¹² Department of Materials Science and Engineering, University of Connecticut, Storrs, CT, 06269, USA.
¹³ Materials Research and Technology Department, Luxembourg Institute of Science and Technology (LIST), 5 avenue des Hauts-Fourneaux, L-4362, Esch/Alzette, Luxemburg.
¹⁴ Physics and Materials Science Research Unit, University of Luxembourg, 41, rue du Brill, L-4422, Belvaux, Luxembourg.
¹⁵ Department of Materials Science and Engineering, University of California, Irvine, Irvine, CA, 92697, USA.
¹⁶ Irvine Materials Research Institute, University of California, Irvine, Irvine, CA, 92697, USA.
¹⁷ Department of Materials Science and Engineering, University of California, Berkeley, Berkeley, CA, 94720, USA. rramesh@berkeley.edu.
¹⁸ Materials Sciences Division, Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory, Berkeley, CA, 94720, USA. rramesh@berkeley.edu.
¹⁹ Department of Physics, University of California, Berkeley, Berkeley, CA, 94720, USA. rramesh@berkeley.edu.

Abstract

Magnetoelectric coupling at room temperature in multiferroic materials, such as BiFeO₃, is one of the leading candidates to develop low-power spintronics and emerging memory technologies. Although extensive research activity has been devoted recently to exploring the physical properties, especially focusing on ferroelectricity and antiferromagnetism in chemically modified BiFeO₃, a concrete understanding of the magnetoelectric coupling is yet to be fulfilled. We have discovered that La substitutions at the Bi-site lead to a progressive increase in the degeneracy of the potential energy landscape of the BiFeO₃ system exemplified by a rotation of the polar axis away from the 〈111〉_pc towards the 〈112〉_pc discretion. This is accompanied by corresponding rotation of the antiferromagnetic axis as well, thus maintaining the right-handed vectorial relationship between ferroelectric polarization, antiferromagnetic vector and the Dzyaloshinskii-Moriya vector. As a consequence, La-BiFeO₃ films exhibit a magnetoelectric coupling that is distinctly different from the undoped BiFeO₃ films.

Abstract

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