Electrical Control of the Magnetic State of Fe

Magneto-electric coupling offers a new pathway to information storage in magnetic memory devices. This phenomenon has been observed in various materials ranging from insulators to semiconductors. In bulk metallic systems, magneto-electric coupling has been disregarded as the electric field cannot enter bulk metals. In this work, we show that a substantial magneto-electric coupling exists in metallic Fe nano-islands grown on Cu(111). Using the electric field in the tunnel junction of a scanning tunneling microscope, the magnetic order parameter and the crystal structure of Fe was changed on the nanometer scale. This allows high density nonvolatile information storage by means of magneto-electric coupling in a simple metallic system.