This article is written on behalf of many colleagues, collaborators, and researchers in the field of complex oxides as well as current and former students and postdocs who continue to enable and undertake cutting-edge research in the field of multiferroics, magnetoelectrics, and the pursuit of electric-field control of magnetism. What I present is something that is extremely exciting from both a fundamental science and applications perspective and has the potential to revolutionize our world, particularly from a sustainability perspective. To realize this potential will require numerous new innovations, both in the fundamental science arena as well as translating these scientific discoveries into real applications. Thus, this article will attempt to bridge the gap between fundamental materials physics and the actual manifestations of the physical concepts into real-life applications. I hope this article will help spur more translational research within the broad materials community.

This article is written on behalf of a large number of colleagues, collaborators, and researchers in the field of complex oxides as well as current and former students and postdocs who continue to enable and undertake cutting-edge research in the field of multiferroics, magnetoelectrics, and the pursuit of electric-field control of magnetism. What we present is something that is extremely exciting from both a fundamental science and applications perspective and has the potential to revolutionize our world. Needless to say, to realize this potential will require numerous new innovations, both in the fundamental science arena as well as translating these scientific discoveries into real applications. Thus, this article will attempt to bridge the gap between fundamental condensed-matter physics and the actual manifestations of the physical concepts into real-life applications. We hope this article will help spur more translational research within the broad materials physics community.

We review recent developments and advances in multiferroic and magnetoelectric heterostructures. Driven by the promise of new materials functionality (i.e. electric field control of ferromagnetism), extensive on-going research is focused on the search for and characterization of new multiferroic materials. In this review we develop a comprehensive overview of multiferroic materials, including details on the nature of order parameters and coupling in these materials, the scarcity of such materials in single phase form, routes to create and control the properties of these materials, and we finish by investigating such effects in a number of model materials and heterostructures. This includes an in-depth discussion of BiFeO 3, an investigation of recent advances in magnetoelectric materials, and an introduction to a variety of approaches by which one can achieve novel materials functionality. © 2011 Acta Materialia Inc. Published by Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.