The field of multifunctional/multiferroic materials is expanding rapidly and embracing other cross-disciplinary areas as its potential being realized and established in designing novel and tunable multifunctional sensors for structural and human health monitoring, energy harvesting and other applications. Also, it has provided the incentives for the development and design of a new class of electronic meta-materials with an unusual combination of properties. Because of its multi-dimensionality and the resulting impacts in various futuristic research areas, a broad scale cooperative research activity in this ‘New Era of Interdisciplinary Sciences’ has been established through the NSF funded program “International Network for Advanced and Multifunctional Materials - INAMM.” With this aim in mind a special group of international scientists was invited. They presented the current status and forward looking views on this field. This special issue captures this spirit of the field through a number of selected research papers whose main themes embodied in this issue are:
| a. | Exploring design principles of multi-functional materials at nano- to mesoscale. | ||||
| b. | Nano-scale multiferroic design/simulations/synthesis and novel applications. | ||||
| c. | Bio-inspired materials, bio-metamaterials and device potential. | ||||
| d. | Controlling and exploiting topological defects in materials. | ||||
| e. | Emergent novel functionality at the interfaces; including bio-inorganic interfaces. | ||||
| f. | Energy harvesting materials and multiferroics. | ||||
| g. | Functionality of implanted components in the human body; energy harvesting from the biological/physical activities. | ||||
The specific articles included in this special peer reviewed issue of Integrated Ferroelectrics are the contributions from the selected invited researchers. The papers cover the theoretical aspects of fundamentals of ferroics including the emerging concepts of Skyrmions, related topological defects and their impact in Materials Science, structure-property relationship in ferroics, modeling and device fabrication approaches, several experimental and synthesis aspects of magnetoelectric materials and bio-materials as well as related developments.
The Guest Editors of this issue provided their critical review of this field and are very much in agreement with their previous years' projections and the development of this growing field. They continue to envision a very strong imprint and scope of this field on the research in near future, which is likely to encompass the major interdisciplinary research thrusts in the coming years. Their views are based on the growing reports in the recent years and are of the opinion that the biomaterials do exhibit bioflexoelectric and biomultiferroic like properties. The open panel discussion held during this INAMM symposium brought out a clear support to this hypothesis. As the multiferroic research moves closer to the nanoscale materials investigation, there will be more possibilities and a higher probability of revealing such biomultiferroic phenomena. The attendees of this special symposium are looking forward to the growth of this field through the continued successful international collaboration. They would like to see more emphasis on topics like bioferroics and their impacts on everyday health issues through the development of novel biosensors; various areas of energy harvesting enabled through human activities to be used directly for the functionalities of implanted components in the human body. The other leading areas in the upcoming INAMM meeting, could be the multi-input tunable sensors mimicking the capabilities of human perception sensors, neural networks and GHz to THz interactions with the human brain functionalities. Another important growing area is that of topological materials which encompasses Dirac materials, Weyl semi-metals and topological insulators. In these materials the unusual topology of electronic band structure leads to intriguing properties.
The organizers also discussed one of the emerging aspects of the multi-functionality of core materials belonging to the perovskite family. These materials have impacted the broad range of applications in electronic devices as mentioned above. The upcoming INAMM meetings will include the impacts of mixed or organic/inorganic hybrid perovskites, specifically in the area of photovoltaic and solar cell applications. While several well-known perovskite family materials are useful for small scale energy harvesting applications, the exploitation of mixed perovskites for solar cell applications would be of great importance and rewarding in the near future. Although there are several environment related concerns that have emerged due to their Pb-containing compositions (in the currently reported materials), these mixed/hybrid perovskites have shown great promise on energy related fronts.
We are grateful for the financial support of the NSF/ INAMM - International Network for the Advanced and Multifunctional Materials Program, Taylor and Francis publishers group, Brazilian funding agencies CAPES and CNPq, Maringa University, Brazil, to organize such a symposium at the State University of Maringa, Parana, Brazil and to make it possible to put forward a special issue to cover such scientific themes.