Ab initio Evidence for Giant Magnetoelectric Responses Driven by Structural Softness

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates that enhancing structural softness in magnetoelectric multiferroics significantly amplifies their magnetoelectric effects, with first-principles results shown for BiFeO3 thin films.

Contribution

It introduces a method to induce structural softness to achieve giant magnetoelectric responses in multiferroics, supported by ab initio calculations.

Findings

Structural softness enhances magnetoelectric effects.

First-principles results for BiFeO3 show large ME responses.

Tuning structure increases material reactivity to fields.

Abstract

We show that inducing structural softness in regular magnetoelectric (ME) multiferroics -- i.e., tuning the materials to make their structure strongly reactive to applied fields -- makes it possible to obtain very large ME effects. We present illustrative first-principles results for BiFeO3 thin films.