Magnetoelectrics & Multiferroics

Magnetoelectrics & Multiferroics

In recent years there has been an enormous interest in the emergent phenomena arising in strongly correlated systems in condensed matter physics. One such phenomenon is the giant magnetoelectric effect or the multiferroicity where the electric and magnetic orders coexist with a strong cross coupling. This renders the manipulation of magnetic ordering by the electric field or vice versa and thus attracted tremendous interest from the academic as well as technological fields. However, it has been a challenging task to find multiferroic materials due to certain symmetry restrictions. It requires that materials with both spatial inversion and time reversal symmetries are broken in order for them to have multiferroic properties. Among the various known multiferroics, the materials with ferroelectricity induced by magnetism have received much attention because of relatively strong coupling between magnetic and electric ordering.