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 ScFeO(3) (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 ScFeO(3) 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 BiFeO(3).

Structural phase transitions and superconductivity in Fe(1+delta)Se0.57Te0.43 at ambient and elevated pressures.

The ternary iron chalcogenide, Fe(1.03)Se(0.57)Te(0.43) is a member of the recently discovered family of Fe-based superconductors with an ambient pressure T(c) of 13.9 K and a simple structure comprising layers of edge-sharing distorted Fe(Se/Te)(4) tetrahedra separated by a van der Waals gap. Here we study the relationship between its structural and electronic responses to the application of pressure. T(c) depends sensitively on applied pressure attaining a broad maximum of 23.3 K at approximately 3 GPa. Further compression to 12 GPa leads to a metallic but nonsuperconducting ground state. High-resolution synchrotron X-ray diffraction shows that the superconducting phase is metrically orthorhombic at ambient pressure but pressurization to approximately 3 GPa leads to a structural transformation to a more distorted structure with monoclinic symmetry. The exact coincidence of the crystal symmetry crossover pressure with that at which T(c) is maximum reveals an intimate link between crystal and electronic structures of the iron chalcogenide superconductors.