Speaker
Description
Ferroelectrics and multiferroics have been widely recognized to play a significant role in next generation energy-efficient electronics, spintronics, and computing technologies, particularly in the fields of non-volatile information storage, sensing, actuation, and in-memory computing. Whilst ferroelectrics are well utilized today in piezoelectric actuators and sensors, RF/SAW filters, ultrasound transducers, and energy harvesters, they still require optimizations and improvements in reliability, retention, scaling, and CMOS compatibility. On the other hand, multiferroics, with their unique coupling of electrical and magnetic orders, represent opportunities for massive downscaling in energy consumption through electrical control of magnetic states, enabling applications for low-power computing. However, in addition to the challenges faced by ferroelectrics, multiferroics are further plagued by weak room-temperature magnetoelectric coefficient, low net magnetization, high switching fields, and complex heterostructure integration constraints.
Here, we propose a novel material system architecture in which polarization and magnetization field profiles in ferroelectrics and multiferroics are intentionally engineered via techniques such as induced strain gradients modifying the strengths of their localized coupling coefficients. Upon application of an electric field, these gradients in-turn generate in-plane polarization and magnetization gradients, where the dependence on the intrinsic coupling parameter itself is greatly reduced and transferred to the deterministic gradient profile. Well-controlled engineered local gradients offer reliability, scaling, as well as, if strongly affecting the local symmetry, could produce large effective output coupling, offering an alternate pathway to design device architecture based on these materials, mitigating the problems that plague the undisturbed material, which were stated before.
| Keyword-1 | Ferroelectrics |
|---|---|
| Keyword-2 | Multiferroics |