Abstract
We provide a general thermodynamic framework to study multicaloric effects in multiferroic materials. This is applied to the case of a magnetoelectric multiferroic such as BiFeO, which is described by means of a Landau free energy with a biquadratic coupling between polarization and magnetization. We obtain a phase diagram, the isothermal entropy change and the adiabatic temperature change across different continuous and first-order phase transitions as the applied electric and magnetic fields are varied. The multicaloric effects are suitably decomposed into the corresponding electrocaloric and magnetocaloric contributions.
Acknowledgments
This work was supported by CICyT (Spain) through project MAT2013-40590-P and in part by the US Department of Energy.