To demonstrate multiferroic heterostructures with a giant converse magnetoelectric (CME) effect, we propose a material design strategy based on utilizing the control of orbital magnetic moments. Following this strategy, we focus on a multiferroic heterostructure composed of (211)-oriented metastable body-centered cubic (bcc) ferromagnetic Co3Mn, which is predicted to exhibit a significant change in magnetic anisotropy due to in-plane piezostrain. By inserting an appropriate Fe/V layer, we experimentally obtain a highly (211)-oriented bcc Co3Mn layer on piezoelectric Pb(Mg1/3Nb2/3)O3-PbTiO3(011). Using this structure, we reproducibly show a giant CME effect with repeatable and nonvolatile magnetization vector switching. Our proposal is one of the important strategies toward the development of room-temperature electric-field-controlled spintronic devices with ultra-low power consumption.
Usami et al. (Tue,) studied this question.