Multiferroic materials having good magnetoelectric coupling are of great interest due to their enormous applications in the field of spintronic devices (1). Magnetoelectric (ME) gallium ferrite is an interesting material due to its room temperature (RT) piezoelectricity and near RT ferrimagnetism along with significant ME coupling (10−11 s/m at 4.2 K) (2). The motive of this work is to increase the magnetic transition temperature (TC) of the material above RT so that the material can have strong ME coupling at room temperature and can be implemented for practical applications. Several earlier reports have shown the magnetic transition temperature of Ga2−xFexO3 increases with higher Fe contents (3). Hence, we chose to study the properties of Ga2−xFexO3 (GFO) only for x = 1.2. Y3Fe5O12 (YIG) is another material which is RT ferromagnet with very high resistivity (resistivity ~ 1012 Ω.cm) (4). In this work, by forming GFO-YIG composite with only 10% concentration of YIG, phase transition temperature is increased beyond room temperature from ~ 289 K for GFO to ~ 309 K for 0.9 GFO – 0.1 YIG as shown in Fig. 1. The remnant magnetisation is also enhanced from 0.211 emu/g to 2.82 emu/g inset of Fig. 2 reporting a magnetisation of ~ 8.2 emu/g at 30 kOe Fig. 2. References 1 J. F. Scott, Nature Materials, vol. 6, no. 4, pp. 256–257, Mar. 2007. 2 J. P. Remeika, Journal of Applied Physics, no. 5, 1960. 3 T. Arima et al., Physical Review B - Condensed Matter and Materials Physics, vol. 70, no. 6, 2004. 4 W. Swee Yin, J. Hassan, W. Mohd, and D. W. Yusoff, Solid State Science and Technology, vol. 19, pp. 259–267, 2011.

Fig. 1 dM/dT versus Temperature plot indicating the phase transition temperature (TC)

Fig. 2 Magnetic hysteresis loop obtained at room temperature. Inset of (b) shows the zoomed-out magnetic hysteresis loop of 0.9 Ga0.8Fe1.2O3 – 0.1 Y3Fe5O12 composite at a magnetic field range of 4 kOe.