Artificial design of anisotropic magnetoelectric effect in Sr2IrO4/SrTiO3 superlattices
Magnetoelectric response in thin films is highly desirable for high-throughput and high-density microelectronic applications, like magnetic sensors. To sensitively detect the direction of magnetic field, the anisotropic magnetoelectric effect is required. Here, we artificially design an anisotropic magnetoelectric response in Sr2IrO4/SrTiO3 superlattices, where a strong (negligible) magnetoelectric response for magnetic fields along the z-direction (xy-plane) of Sr2IrO4/SrTiO3 interface was observed. A combination of perturbative calculations with numerical results and density functional theory calculations reveals that only the effective z-component Zeeman field within the Sr2IrO4 layers can change the electron occupation of the neighboring SrTiO3 layers, which is proportional to the polarization. Via controlling the periodicity of the superlattices, we can further control the anisotropy of magnetoelectric responses. This atomic-scale design of 3d/5d superlattices paves an alternative way toward controllable magnetoelectric effects with thin film integrations.
Authors
- Maoyuan Wang (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7280-8947)
- Peipei Lu (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8267-8584)
- Nian X. Sun (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-3120-0094)
- Dayu Yan (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6484-9968)
- Young Sun (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8879-3508)
- Fa Wang (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6220-5349)
- Xin Liu (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-2631-277X)
- Yuanwei Sun (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-5058-6623)
- Mei Wu (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0323-8068)
- Youguo Shi (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6610-6989)
- Biao Wu
Institutions
- Northeastern University (US)
- Xiamen University (CN)
- Chinese Academy of Sciences (CN)
- Peking University (CN)
- Beijing Normal University (CN)
- Paul Scherrer Institute (CH)
- Institute of Physics (CN)
- University of Chinese Academy of Sciences (CN)
- Hebei Normal University (CN)
Publication Details
- Journal
- Applied Physics Letters
- Published
- 2024-08-12
- DOI
- https://doi.org/10.1063/5.0221322
- Citations
- 1
- Primary Topic
- Multiferroics and related materials
- Type
- article
- Field-Weighted Citation Impact
- 0.12
Funders
- National Natural Science Foundation of China
- National Key Research and Development Program of China
- Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities