Advances in hierarchical materials property prediction of multiferroic compounds

This talk will summarize experimental and theoretical advances in magnetic and ferroelectric materials at multiple length scales. I will first discuss some recent work on exotic magnetic and polar states observed in BiFeO3 domain walls [1] and skyrmion states found in PbTiO3/SrTiO3 superlattices [2]. Both systems motivate the need for accurate predictive modeling of structural order parameters which need to be carefully coupled to their complex boundary conditions. To that end, I will provide an update on the following theoretical projects that we, at the institute, have been working on: (i) ab initio calculations of GaV4Se8 with the aim of parameterizing its Landau energy surface, (ii) developing continuum micromagnetic simulations in the Ferret simulation package and (iii) controlling topological states in ferroelectric PbTiO3 nanostructures [3].

[1] J.-Y. Chauleau et al., Nature Materials doi:10.1038/s41563-019-0516-z (2019).
[2] S. Das et al., Nature 568, 368 (2019).
[3] Y. Tikhonov et al., arXiv preprint arXiv:2001.01790 (2020).