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Giant barocaloric effects at low pressure in ferrielectric ammonium sulphate.


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Authors

Lloveras, P 
Stern-Taulats, E 
Barrio, M 
Tamarit, J-Ll 
Crossley, S 

Abstract

Caloric effects are currently under intense study due to the prospect of environment-friendly cooling applications. Most of the research is centred on large magnetocaloric effects and large electrocaloric effects, but the former require large magnetic fields that are challenging to generate economically and the latter require large electric fields that can only be applied without breakdown in thin samples. Here we use small changes in hydrostatic pressure to drive giant inverse barocaloric effects near the ferrielectric phase transition in ammonium sulphate. We find barocaloric effects and strengths that exceed those previously observed near magnetostructural phase transitions in magnetic materials. Our findings should therefore inspire the discovery of giant barocaloric effects in a wide range of unexplored ferroelectric materials, ultimately leading to barocaloric cooling devices.

Description

Keywords

0302 Inorganic Chemistry

Journal Title

Nat Commun

Conference Name

Journal ISSN

2041-1723
2041-1723

Volume Title

6

Publisher

Springer Science and Business Media LLC
Sponsorship
Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EP/M003752/1)
The Royal Society (uf120210)
This work was supported by the UK EPSRC grant EP/M003752/1, by CICyT (Spain), projects No. MAT2013-40590-P and FIS2011-24439, and by DGU (Catalonia), project 2014SGR00581. We thank D. Sheptyakov for assistance with high-pressure neutron diffraction. P. Ll. acknowledges support from SUR (DEC, Catalonia). E. S.-T. acknowledges support from AGAUR. X. M. is grateful for support from the Spanish MEC Ramón y Cajal programme and the Royal Society.