Tuning the multiferroic mechanisms of TbMnO3 by epitaxial strain

Abstract

A current challenge in the field of magnetoelectric multiferroics is to identify systems that allow a controlled tuning of states displaying distinct magnetoelectric responses. Here we show that the multiferroic ground state of the archetypal multiferroic TbMnO3 is dramatically modified by epitaxial strain. Neutron diffraction reveals that in highly strained films the magnetic order changes from the bulk-like incommensurate bc-cycloidal structure to commensurate magnetic order. Concomitant with the modification of the magnetic ground state, optical second-harmonic generation (SHG) and electric measurements show an enormous increase of the ferroelectric polarization, and a change in its direction from along the c- to the a-axis. Our results suggest that the drastic change of multiferroic properties results from a switch of the spin-current magnetoelectric coupling in bulk TbMnO3 to symmetric magnetostriction in epitaxially-strained TbMnO3. These findings experimentally demonstrate that epitaxial strain can be used to control single-phase spin-driven multiferroic states.

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Cited by in corpus (7)

• Relationship between crystal structure and multiferroic orders in orthorhombic perovskite manganites
• Single-axis dependent structural and multiferroic properties of orthorhombic RMnO${}_3$ (R = Gd - Lu)
• High-temperature ferroelectric order and magnetic field-cooled effect driven magnetoelectric coupling in R2BaCuO5 (R= Er, Dy, Sm)
• Topological solitons and bulk polarization switch in collinear type II multiferroics
• Simple microscopic model for magneto-electric coupling in type-II antiferromagnetic multiferroics
• Exploring magneto-electric coupling through lattice distortions: insights from a pantograph model
• Elastic and magnetoelastic properties of TbMnO3 single crystal by nanosecond time resolved acoustics and first-principles calculations