Research progress and future directions of multiferroic materials

Multiferroic magnetoelectric (ME) materials can not only consist of ferroelectric, magnetic or ferroelastic orders, but also novel effects produced by the coupling interaction between multi-order parameters. This kind of functional materials exhibit significant potential applications in the fields of novel multifunctional magnetic-electric devices, spintronics devices, and high performance information storage and processing, etc. Besides, multiferroic has become a hot topic due to its rich connotation in condensed matter physics concerning charge, spin, orbital, and lattice. In this paper, we review the history and the progress in the recent development of multiferroic compounds and composites, with the attention focused on the discussion of the key scientific challenges and the prospects of the future directions.