Abstract
The basis for key applications of ferroic materials is the ability to reverse the orientation of the order parameter and, accompanied by that, the sign or direction of a physical vectorial or tensorial quantity [
1,
2]. This characteristic allows one to distinguish otherwise symmetry-equivalent material classes such as pyroelectric materials (polar but not switchable) from ferroelectric materials (polar and switchable). The feature to experimentally manipulate—to “write”—a material property that is connected to the order parameter extends the applicability of ferroic materials from merely passive devices like sensors to new fields such as actuators, memory cells or logic gates. While some of the established ferroic materials, in particular ferromagnets and ferroelectrics, are widely used in scientific and technological applications, ferrotoroidic materials are far from being technologically applicable. This is especially because the generation of an actual conjugate field seems elusive so far.