New Fluoride-based Magnetoelectrics

磁电材料是一类特殊的固态材料，它同时具有磁性和电学有序性。目前，许多信息存储技术是基于磁或电的排序和可切换性。如果一种材料同时具有这两种性质，那么原则上，应该可以有利地利用这一点，例如通过电存储数据，但通过磁阅读数据。因此，最近在材料科学和物理界的推动下，全世界对这种磁电材料的兴趣重新抬头。虽然这已经导致了相当多的基本理解的材料，但它也标志着严重缺乏新的材料被发现和开发。这个“发现”方面是固态化学家的领域，在这个项目中，我们的目标是从固态化学的角度来解决这个问题。我们将探索新的混合金属氟化物材料作为潜在的磁电体，基于我们对这一系列化合物的结构和组成化学的充分理解。我们将用各种晶体学和物理学方法（如：磁和电）技术，以确定这些材料的关键结构-性能-组成关系。最终，我们的目标是提供一系列表现出磁电效应的新材料，材料科学和物理界将能够基于这些材料开展更多的应用和开发工作。

Magnetoelectrics are a special class of solid-state material which simultaneously possess both magnetic and electrical ordering properties. Currently, many information storage technologies are based on either magnetic or electrical ordering and switchability. If a materials possesses both these properties then, in principle, it should be possible to exploit this advantageously, for example by storing data electrically, but reading it magnetically. There has therefore been a recent resurgence of interest worldwide in such magnetoelectric materials, driven largely by the materials science and physics communities. Although this has led to considerable fundamental understanding of exisiting materials it has also flagged up a serious lack of new materials being discovered and developed. This 'discovery' aspect is the realm of the solid state chemist, and in this project we aim to address this problem from a solid state chemistry perspective. We shall explore new mixed metal fluoride materials as potential magnetoelectrics, basing our search on a sound understanding of the structural and compositional chemistry of this family of compounds. We shall characterise our new compounds using a variety of crystallographic and physical (ie. magnetic and electrical) techniques in order to pin down the key structure-property-composition relations of these materials. Ultimately, we aim to provide a range of new materials exhibiting magnetoelectric effects, on which the materials science and physics communities will be able to base more applied and developmental work.