Tunable temperature dependence of electric-field-control multicaloric effects

Abstract

Magnetocaloric effects, because of their large entropy change, have been demonstrated to potentially revolutionize the solid-state cooling devices with high energy efficiency and environmental friendliness. However, the requirement of applying large magnetic fields obstructs the minimization of cooling devices. Here, we investigated electric-field-control magnetocaloric effects in magnetoelectric heterostructures by combining thermodynamic modelling and first-principle calculations. Based on strain-mediated mechanism, it is demonstrated that the interface strain of ferroelectric film under the electric field can tune the magnetic transition temperature from ferromagnetic to antiferromagnetic phases with 5 K shift under a small electric field of 0.1 MV/m and a giant entropy change of 14.9 J/(kg·K). In addition, we propose a potential multicaloric device including magnetocaloric and elastocaloric effects with high cooling efficiency based on magnetic-elastic-electric coupling phase transformations. The present study therefore contributes to the understanding of electric-field-control magnetocaloric cooling and provides guidance for experiments to design high efficiency and low-power consumption multicaloric cooling devices using magnetoelectric heterostructures.