Compositional dependence of hyperfi ne interactions and magnetoelectric coupling in (BiFeO3)x-(BaTiO3)1–x solid solutions

The promise of coupling between magnetization and electric polarization and the potential to manipulate one through the other has become in recent years a driving force for many experimental works on multiferroic materials. The ultimate goal of these studies would be a single-phase material exhibiting a strong coupling between inherent ferromagnetic and ferroelectric ordering at room temperature. Magnetoelectric coupling is characterized by the magnetoelectric voltage coeffi cient ME which describes the change in the magnetically induced electric fi eld per unit of the applied magnetic fi eld [1]. Recently, magnetoelectric coupling at room temperature was found to exhibit significant magnitudes in the single-phase electroceramics of (BiFeO3)x-(BaTiO3)1–x synthesized by the solid-state sintering method [2]. By appropriately refi ning the chemical composition of these materials and their processes of synthesis, our group has even achieved up to 66% higher values of the ME coeffi cient [3]. Driven by the desire to understand the mechanism of the magnetoelectric effect which occurs in these materials, additional experiments involving X-ray diffraction (XRD), 57Fe Mössbauer spectroscopy (MS), and vibrating sample magnetometry (VSM) were conducted. The measurements were made for two series of samples fabricated from: (1) precursor oxides Bi2O3, Fe2O3, TiO2, and barium carbonate (BaCO3) [4]; and (2) commercial barium titanate (BaTiO3) (instead of TiO2 and BaCO3) [3]. The Compositional dependence of hyperfi ne interactions and magnetoelectric coupling in (BiFeO3)x-(BaTiO3)1–x solid solutions Karol Kowal, Piotr Guzdek, Maciej Kowalczyk, Elżbieta Jartych