Ferroic materials and ferroic–magnetic integration

The promise. Ferroic materials — for example wurtzite nitrides [AFM] — combine intrinsic bistability with fast switching dynamics, making them a decades-old candidate platform for nonvolatile logic and memory: a single material that holds state and switches it, dramatically reducing the energy cost of moving data between memory and processor.

The open theory question. How structural instability, covalency, and electron correlation cooperate or compete to stabilise a ferroic phase [JACS] remains a rich source for fundamental materials theory. Despite decades of work, materials that combine multiple ferroic orders — ferroelectricity together with magnetism, for instance — remain rare, and their integration into practical devices is more so.

A particularly underexplored direction. Combining ferroic materials with non-relativistic spin-split antiferromagnets. My collaborators [preprint-AATJ] demonstrated a record-high 360% magnetoresistance at room temperature in an antiferromagnetic tunnel junction — a concrete pointer toward the kind of device physics this combination can enable.

What it could enable. A future class of compact, low-power, on-chip storage and logic primitives that don’t depend on conventional ferromagnets — and a direct path for ferroic materials into the spintronic device stack.