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，探索了一类重要的功能材料，铁性材料的前沿，包括压电（将机械能转换为电能，反之亦然），铁电体（具有可切换的极化）和磁电体（具有相互作用的极化和磁化）。这些材料可用于广泛的工业和商业应用，例如，作为未来计算机中的非易失性随机存取存储器设备，用于振动或噪声主动控制的“智能”传感器和致动器，用于医学成像，生物传感或能量收集的高分辨率超声换能器。有趣的铁电性质，这是必不可少的，这些应用程序，从微观和纳米晶体化学材料，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过渡的结果。因此，理解纳米结构和宏观功能性质之间的关系是铁性材料研究的核心，我们的研究计划也是沿着这条路线建立的。

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.