Nanoscale structural modulation and enhanced room-temperature multiferroic properties.

Availability of a single-phase multiferroic material functional at room temperature poses a big challenge, although it is very important to both fundamental physics and application development. Recently, layered Aurivillius oxide materials, one of the most promising candidates, have attracted considerable interest. In this work, we investigated the nanoscale structural evolution of the six-layer Bi7Fe(3-x)Co(x)Ti3O21 when substituting excessive Co. Nanoscale structural modulation (NSM) occurred at the boundaries when changing the material gradually from the originally designed six-layer nanoscale architecture down to five and then four, when increasing the Co content, inducing a previously unidentified analogous morphotropic transformation (AMT) effect. The AMT's net contribution to the enhanced intrinsic multiferroic properties at room temperature was confirmed by quantifying and deducting the contribution from the existing impurity phase using derivative thermo-magneto-gravimetry measurements (DTMG). Significantly, this new AMT effect may be caused by a possible coupling contribution from co-existing NSM phases, indicating a potential method for realizing multiferroic materials that function at room temperature.