Magnetoelectric phase transition driven by interfacial-engineered Dzyaloshinskii-Moriya interaction

Strongly correlated oxides with a broken symmetry could exhibit various phase transitions, such as superconductivity, magnetism and ferroelectricity. Construction of superlattices using these materials is effective to design crystal symmetries at atomic scale for emergent orderings and phases. Here, antiferromagnetic Ruddlesden-Popper Sr₂IrO₄ and perovskite paraelectric (ferroelectric) SrTiO₃ (BaTiO₃) are selected to epitaxially fabricate superlattices for symmetry engineering. An emergent magnetoelectric phase transition is achieved in Sr₂IrO₄/SrTiO₃ superlattices with artificially designed ferroelectricity, where an observable interfacial Dzyaloshinskii-Moriya interaction driven by non-equivalent interface is considered as the microscopic origin. By further increasing the polarization namely interfacial Dzyaloshinskii-Moriya interaction via replacing SrTiO₃ with BaTiO₃, the transition temperature can be enhanced from 46 K to 203 K, accompanying a pronounced magnetoelectric coefficient of ~495 mV/cm·Oe. This interfacial engineering of Dzyaloshinskii-Moriya interaction provides a strategy to design quantum phases and orderings in correlated electron systems.