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[materialsscienceandengineering]

Two Sides of the Same Coin: Tiny Electrical Vortexes Bridge Gap Between Ferroelectric and Ferromagnetic Materials

University of Warwick physicists discover presence of a special ferroelectric texture that mirrors the spin crystal phase (checkerboard-like symmetry) in ferromagnets.

Ferromagnetic materials have a permanent magnetic field. Ferroelectric materials do the same with an electric field

Researchers suggest that at small enough scales, the characteristics of the two could be almost identical, although they are caused by very different physics

Both classes of material have uses in electronics, particularly data storage

Ferromagnetic materials have a self-generating magnetic field, ferroelectric materials generate their own electrical field. Although electric and magnetic fields are related, physics tells us that they are very different classes of material. Now the discovery by University of Warwick-led scientists of a complex electrical ‘vortex’-like pattern that mirrors its magnetic counterpart suggests that they could actually be two sides of the same coin.

Detailed in a new study for the journal Nature, funded by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC), part of UK Research and Innovation, and the Royal Society, the results give the first evidence of a process in ferroelectric materials comparable to the Dzyaloshinskii–Moriya interaction in ferromagnets. This particular interaction plays a pivotal role in stabilizing topological magnetic structures, such as skyrmions, and it might be crucial for potential new electronic technologies exploiting their electrical analogs.

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[materialsscienceandengineering]

Supercrystal: A hidden phase of matter created by a burst of light

"Frustration" plus a pulse of laser light resulted in a stable "supercrystal" created by a team of researchers led by Penn State and Argonne National Laboratory, together with University of California, Berkeley, and two other national laboratories.

This is one of the first examples of a new state of matter with long-term stability transfigured by the energy from a sub-pico-second laser pulse. The team's goal, supported by the Department of Energy, is to discover interesting states of matter with unusual properties that do not exist in equilibrium in nature.

"We are looking for hidden states of matter by taking the matter out of its comfortable state, which we call the ground state," says the Penn State team leader Venkatraman Gopalan, professor of materials science. "We do this by exciting the electrons into a higher state using a photon, and then watching as the material falls back to its normal state. The idea is that in the excited state, or in a state it passes through for the blink of an eye on the way to the ground state, we will find properties that we would desire to have, such as new forms of polar, magnetic and electronic states."

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