Ferroelectricity and ferromagnetism in EuTiO3 nanowires

Abstract

We predicted the ferroelectric-ferromagnetic multiferroic properties of EuTiO3 nanowires and generated the phase diagrams in coordinates of temperature and wire radii. The calculations were performed within the Landau-Ginzburg-Devonshire theory with phenomenological parameters extracted from tabulated experimental data and first principles calculations. Since bulk EuTiO3 is antiferromagnetic at temperatures lower than 5.5 K and paraelectric at all temperatures, our goal was to investigate the possibility of inducing the ferroelectric and ferromagnetic properties of EuTiO3 by reducing the bulk to nanosystems. Our results indicate that ferroelectric spontaneous polarization of ~0.1-0.5C/m2 is induced in EuTiO3 nanowires due to the intrinsic surface stress, which is inversely proportional to the nanowire radius. The spontaneous polarization exists at temperatures lower than 300 K, for the wire radius less than 1 nm and typical surface stress coefficients ~ 15 N/m. Due to the strong biquadratic magnetoelectric coupling, the spontaneous polarization in turn induces the ferromagnetic phase at temperatures lower than 30 K for 2 nm nanowire, and at temperatures lower than 10 K for 4 nm nanowire in EuTiO3. Thus we predicted that the EuTiO3 nanowires can be the new ferroelectric-ferromagnetic multiferroic.

22 pages, 5 figures, 1 table

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Cited by in corpus (4)

• New multiferroics based on EuxSr1-xTiO3 nanotubes and nanowires
• Low-symmetry monoclinic phase stabilized by oxygen octahedra rotations in thin strained EuxSr1-xTiO3 films
• Defect engineering of magnetic ground state in EuTiO${}_3$ epitaxial thin films
• Rotomagnetic couplings influence on the magnetic properties of antiferrodistortive antiferromagnets