Ferroelectricity in underdoped La-based cuprates.

Doping a "parent" antiferromagnetic Mott insulator in cuprates leads to short-range electronic correlations and eventually to high-Tc superconductivity. However, the nature of charge correlations in the lightly doped cuprates remains unclear. Understanding the intermediate electronic phase in the phase diagram (between the parent insulator and the high-Tc superconductor) is expected to elucidate the complexity both inside and outside the superconducting dome, and in particular in the underdoped region. One such phase is ferroelectricity whose origin and relation to the properties of high-Tc superconductors is subject of current research. Here we demonstrate that ferroelectricity and the associated magnetoelectric coupling are in fact common in La-214 cuprates namely, La2-xSrxCuO4, La2LixCu1-xO4 and La2CuO4+x. It is proposed that ferroelectricity may result from local CuO6 octahedral distortions, associated with the dopant atoms and clustering of the doped charge carriers, which break spatial inversion symmetry at the local scale whereas magnetoelectric coupling can be tuned through Dzyaloshinskii-Moriya interaction.

Tunable ferroelectricity in artificial tri-layer superlattices comprised of non-ferroic components.

Heterostructured material systems devoid of ferroic components are presumed not to display ordering associated with ferroelectricity. In heterostructures composed of transition metal oxides, however, the disruption introduced by an interface can affect the balance of the competing interactions among electronic spins, charges and orbitals. This has led to the emergence of properties absent in the original building blocks of a heterostructure, including metallicity, magnetism and superconductivity. Here we report the discovery of ferroelectricity in artificial tri-layer superlattices consisting solely of non-ferroelectric NdMnO(3)/SrMnO(3)/LaMnO(3) layers. Ferroelectricity was observed below 40 K exhibiting strong tunability by superlattice periodicity. Furthermore, magnetoelectric coupling resulted in 150% magnetic modulation of the polarization. Density functional calculations indicate that broken space inversion symmetry and mixed valency, because of cationic asymmetry and interfacial polar discontinuity, respectively, give rise to the observed behaviour. Our results demonstrate the engineering of asymmetric layered structures with emergent ferroelectric and magnetic field tunable functions distinct from that of normal devices, for which the components are typically ferroelectrics.