High-Pressure Hydrothermal Crystal Growth and Multiferroic Properties of a Perovskite YMnO3

Orthorhombic perovskites RMnO3 are representative of spin-driven ferroelectrics. When the radius of the rare-earth ion R is smaller than that of Dy, for instance in YMnO3, the orthorhombic phase becomes metastable at ambient pressure, which impedes the crystal growth; thus, the detailed magnetic and multiferroic properties of the metastable phase have not been characterized. In this work, we successfully obtained single crystals of orthorhombic YMnO3 using quasi-hydrothermal conditions under a high pressure of 5.5 GPa. Magnetic and dielectric measurements under magnetic fields revealed that the magnetic ground state is the commensurate E-type antiferromagnetic, while a cycloidal spin phase likely coexists in the intermediate temperature range, which enhances the magnetoelectric response to external fields.