Gigantic optical magnetoelectric effect in CuB₂O₄

Although it has been well known that materials in which both space inversion and time reversal symmetries are broken can host optical magneto-electric effect, i.e., change in optical constants with the reversal of propagating direction of light, the largest change in absorption ever reported on this effect was 0.2%. Here we show that optical absorption in noncentrosymmetric weak ferromagnetic material CuB₂O₄ changes by more than 100% with reversal of a low magnetic field of 300 Oe. The gigantic optical magneto-electric effect is ascribed to the canted antiferromagnetic spin ordering of square-coordinated Cu²⁺ sites, where the local inversion is slightly broken.