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Recent advances in multiferroic materials offer promising prospects for next-generation memory and data-processing devices. Previous studies [1,2] have shown that rare-earth manganates RMn₂O₅, particularly with R = Gd, are strong candidates for storage applications due to their topologically protected four-state magnetoelectric switching and the efficient electric-field control of this switching.
In this work, we demonstrate that this system enables the realization of a multi-cell storage unit capable of encoding and decoding at least five bits. We show that only two key ingredients are required:
(i) the four-state magnetoelectric switching observed during magnetic-field sweeps, and
(ii) a ferroelectric domain structure in the bulk together with local inhomogeneities (e.g., internal mechanical stresses, compositional variations, or structural defects) that produce a distribution of the spin-flop critical field $H_c$ across different domains.
Thus, the magnetoelectric domains in GdMn₂O₅ are not an unwanted bug but an essential feature enabling multi-cell functionality.
[1] L. Ponet, et al., Topologically protected magnetoelectric switching in a multiferroic. Nature 607, 81–85 (2022), doi:10.1038/s41586-022-04851-6
[2] H. Wang, et al., Observation of Universal Topological Magnetoelectric Switching in Multiferroic GdMn2O5. Phys. Rev. Lett. 134, 016708 (2025), doi:10.1103/PhysRevLett.134.016708