Speaker
Description
Multiferroic antiperovskite materials have shown considerable promise in recent years due to functionalities enabled by the coupling between their magnetic, mechanical, or electronic properties, leading to potential applications in sensors, transduers, spintronics, and novel memory devices. Understanding this coupling, and most importantly reliably controlling it with the application of various stimuli is crucial if these materials were to be used as the next generation of functional devices.
The thin film material Mn₃Cu₀.₅Sn₀.₅N (MCSN) is a non-collinear antiferromagnet with unique magnetostructural coupling properties, such as negative thermal expansion and the magnetocaloric effect. These properties are highly sensitive to local strain variations, which can significantly influence the magnetic behavior of the material. Given the strong link between magnetic properties and structure, techniques such as 4D-STEM provide an ideal resolution and length scale to analyze strain effects and the presence of structurally distinct phases. Additionally, relating compositional variations with structural features is another important aspect we wanted to explore. For this, we used APT to correlate chemistry in 3 dimensions with electron diffraction data, allowing a better understanding on how the two relate to the magnetic properties at the nanoscale, providing insight into bulk magnetic measurements previously performed on these thin films.
