Magnetoelectric Multiferroic Materials

Magnetoelectric multiferroics exhibit simultaneous ferroelectric and magnetic orders, which allows a built-in coupling between the two orders, resulting in magnetoelectric effects. Multiferroics are perfect systems for exploring how spin, charge, and lattice, which are often considered independent degrees of freedom in a material, couple to each other. In addition, the potential application of the magnetoelectric effect, especially the electric-field control of magnetism, drives the field toward realizing high-energy-efficiency and scalable memory and logic operations for next generation computing devices. This chapter reviews the key fundamental understanding gained in the past decades of investigation in magnetoelectric multiferroics and the representative material systems.