Frontiers in Multi-Ferroic Materials: from Novel Syntheses to Nano Structure - Functional Property Relations

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Research in the field of functional materials plays an important role in solving current and future global challenges related to societal problems concerning energy, environment and health. This proposal describes a comprehensive research program that explores the frontiers of an important class of functional materials, the ferroic materials, including the piezoelectrics (which convert mechanical energy into electrical energy, and vice versa), ferroelectrics (with switchable polarization) and magnetoelectrics (with interacting polarization and magnetization). These materials are useful in a vast range of industrial and commercial applications, e.g. as nonvolatile random-access memory devices in future computers, 'smart' sensors and actuators for active control of vibration or noise, high-resolution ultrasonic transducers for medical imaging, bio-sensing or energy harvesting. The intriguing ferroic properties, which are essential to these applications, result from the microscopic and nanoscopic crystal chemistry of materials, i.e. the nature of constituent ions and chemical bonding, the atomic and spin arrangements, and the related phase components and transitions. Therefore, understanding the relationship between nanostructure and macroscopic functional properties is central to ferroic materials research, and it is along this line that our research program is established.