A team of researchers at Rice University has engineered a new version of a well-known multiferroic that exhibits orders of magnitude higher performance at room temperature than its parent material. The study, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, describes a modified version of bismuth ferrite that shows a 10-fold increase in magnetization and 100-fold increase in magnetoelectric coupling compared to standard varieties.

The synthesis process entailed mixing bismuth ferrite with barium titanate while simultaneously growing the material as a thin film on a substrate that distorts its crystal structure.

“Nobody had ever dialed both knobs—the strain and the chemistry—at once,” said Rice materials scientist Lane Martin, who led the study. “We were able to combine two different material systems into a new material with a new structure and a new combination of properties.”