The Magnetoelectric Effect in Transition Metal Oxides: Insights and the Rational Design of New Materials from First Principles

The search for materials displaying a large magnetoelectric effect has occupied researchers for many decades. The rewards could include not only advanced electronics technologies, but also fundamental insights concerning the dielectric and magnetic properties of condensed matter. In this article, we focus on the magnetoelectric effect in transition metal oxides and review the manner in which first-principles calculations have helped guide the search for (and increasingly, predicted) new materials and shed light on the microscopic mechanisms responsible for magnetoelectric phenomena. 1. The challenge of discovering materials with large magnetoelectric responses – First-principles the-ory to the rescue The promise of new, oxide-based electronic de-vices has been fueling the interest in and search for new multifunctional multiferroics (see Figures 1(a) and b), a promising class of materials that possess mor