Room-temperature spin-spiral multiferroicity in high-pressure cupric oxide

Multiferroic materials, in which ferroelectric and magnetic ordering coexist, are of fundamental interest for the development of multi-state memory devices that allow for electrical writing and non-destructive magnetic read-out operation. The great challenge is to create multiferroic materials that operate at room-temperature and have a large ferroelectric polarization P. Cupric oxide, CuO, is promising because it exhibits a significant polarization, i.e. P ~ 0.1 μC.cm(−2), for a spin-spiral multiferroic. Unfortunately CuO is only ferroelectric in a temperature range of 20 K, from 210 to 230 K. Here, using a combination of density functional theory and Monte Carlo calculations, we establish that pressure-driven phase competition induces a giant stabilization of the multiferroic phase of CuO, which at 20-40 GPa becomes stable in a domain larger than 300 K, from 0 to T > 300 K. Thus, under high-pressure, CuO is predicted to be a room-temperature multiferroic with large polarization.