A Polar Corundum Oxide Displaying Weak Ferromagnetism at Room Temperature

Combining long-range magnetic order with polarity in the same structure is a prerequisite for the design of (magnetoelectric) multiferroic materials. There are now several demonstrated strategies to achieve this goal, but retaining magnetic order above room temperature remains a difficult target. Iron oxides in the +3 oxidation state have high magnetic ordering temperatures due to the size of the coupled moments. Here we prepare and characterize ScFeO₃ (SFO), which under pressure and in strain-stabilized thin films adopts a polar variant of the corundum structure, one of the archetypal binary oxide structures. Polar corundum ScFeO₃ has a weak ferromagnetic ground state below 356 Kthis is in contrast to the purely antiferromagnetic ground state adopted by the well-studied ferroelectric BiFeO₃.