Engineering charge ordering into multiferroicity

Multiferroic materials have attracted great interests but are rare in nature. In many transitional metal oxides, charge ordering and magnetic ordering coexist, so that a method of engineering charge-ordered materials into ferroelectric materials would lead to a large class of multiferroic materials. We propose a strategy for designing new ferroelectric or even multiferroic materials by inserting a spacing layer into each two layers of chargeordered materials and artificially making a superlattice. One example of the model demonstrated here is the perovskite (LaFeO3)2/LaTiO3 (111) superlattice, in which the LaTiO3 layer acts as the donor and the spacing layer, and the LaFeO3 layer is half doped and performs charge ordering. The collaboration of the charge ordering and the spacing layer breaks the space inversion symmetry, resulting in a large ferroelectric polarization. As the charge ordering also leads to a ferrimagnetic structure, the (LaFeO3)2/LaTiO3 is multiferroic. It is expected that this work can encourage the designing and experimentally implementation of a large class of multiferroic structures with novel properties.