Magnetoelectric materials and devices

Abstract

Over the past few decades, magnetoelectric (ME) materials and devices have been investigated extensively, which is one of the most interesting research topics since the revival of multiferroic laminates with large ME coupling coefficients. The existence of two or more ferroic properties in the ME systems plays key roles in the next generation of novel multifunctional devices. Strong ME coupling has been demonstrated in various ME systems, including single-phase bulk or thin-film materials and bulk or thin-film composites such as piezoelectric/magnetostrictive heterostructures. Based on the coupling mechanisms, a variety of device applications have attracted ever-increasing attention, such as magnetic field sensors, voltage tunable inductors, mechanical ME antennas, which are compact, lightweight, and power-efficient. These novel ME materials and devices provide great opportunities for next-generation magnetic field sensing, communication systems, spintronics, nonvolatile memory applications, etc. In this paper, we try to summarize the most recent progress on ME materials, phenomena, and devices in the past few years, with emphasis on thin-film composite materials and devices. Some unsolved questions and future directions where the community could head for are also provided.

Recent Progress in Devices Based on Magnetoelectric Composite Thin Films

“…With the voltage-induced magnetic states, low energy-consuming non-volatile magnetic memories and magnetic nanologics can be foreseen. The detailed work on the ME heterostructures for the spintronics has been summarized in several comprehensive review articles [ 71 , 72 , 73 ].…”

Aspects of wave propagation in a nonlinear medium: birefringence and the second-order magnetoelectric coefficients

“…Magnetoelectric properties of materials have become an increasingly active research topic along the years [1][2][3]. Although it was first time experimentally verified in the sixties [4] in Cr 2 O 3 crystals, confirming a theoretical description of half an year before [5], the existence of magnetoelectric optical effects were already anticipated more than a century ago [6] by means of simple symmetry assumptions.…”

“…In spite of being tiny effects, the fact that they can be externally controlled by applied fields makes these systems particularly promising for eventual technological applications. Nowadays, with the astonishing improvement in the accuracy of electromagnetic-based apparatus, it seems clear that the conception of new devices working in sub-micron scale and operating at extremely low power consumption is at hand [2,3,7].…”

“…The list of recent achievements in the domain of magnetoelectric materials is really enormous and in several branches of science (for a review see Ref. [3] and references therein). Just to mention few recent results, we refer to the discussion of nonreciprocity of the refraction of light [8], the use optical magnetoelectric effect to identify antiferromagnetic domains [9], the proposal of submillimetric magnetoelectric antennas for wireless energy harvesting and magnetic field sensing [10], the electric field control of natural optical activity [11], among many others.…”

Magnetic-Field-Tunable Intensity Transfer from Optically Active Phonons to Crystal-Field Excitations in the Reflection Spectra of the PrFe3(BO3)4 Antiferromagnet

“…A strong interaction between electronic, magnetic, and lattice degrees of freedom in multiferroics results in a vast variety of phases and phenomena [1][2][3][4], including electronic-structural phase transitions [5], coupled magnon-phonon [6,7] and electron-magnon modes [8], and formation of electromagnons [9,10]. Coupled electron-phonon modes in a terahertz spectral region and related new phenomena were recently discovered in an antiferromagnetic PrFe 3 (BO 3 ) 4 single crystal [11][12][13], a member of a new family of multiferroics [14][15][16][17].…”