A step towards energy-efficient voltage control of magnetic devices
(Phys.org) —Researchers from the NIST Center for Nanoscale Science and Technology and the University of California, Berkeley have discovered a way to create simultaneous images of both the magnetic and the electric domain structures in ferromagnetic/ferroelectric multilayer materials. In a ferroelectric material, the polarization, or direction, of the internal electric field can be controlled by a applying a voltage across the film; in a ferromagnetic material, current-induced magnetic fields are usually used to control the magnetization direction. By combining these two types of materials, it is possible to create low-power magnetic devices, including memory that can be controlled by electric fields (applied voltage) instead of less energy-efficient magnetic fields (applied current). Measuring how the magnetization in a ferromagnet realigns in response to changes in the electric polarization of an adjacent ferroelectric is an important step towards making such low-power devices possible.