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

功能材料领域的研究在解决当前和未来与能源、环境和健康等社会问题相关的全球性挑战方面发挥着重要作用。该提案描述了一个全面的研究计划，探索一类重要功能材料的前沿，铁材料，包括压电材料（将机械能转换为电能，反之亦然），铁电材料（具有可切换的极化）和磁电材料（具有相互作用的极化和磁化）。这些材料在广泛的工业和商业应用中都很有用，例如，作为未来计算机中的非易失性随机存取存储器设备，用于主动控制振动或噪声的“智能”传感器和执行器，用于医学成像、生物传感或能量收集的高分辨率超声波换能器。对这些应用至关重要的耐看的铁性质源于材料的微观和纳米级晶体化学，即组成离子和化学键的性质，原子和自旋排列，以及相关的相成分和转变。因此，了解纳米结构和宏观功能特性之间的关系是铁材料研究的核心，正是沿着这条线，我们的研究计划建立了。

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.