switching of the ferroelectric polarisation in an applied electric field was monitored, allowing an upper bound on the possible value of the electron electric dipole moment to be extracted. This quantity is important because it reflects the amount of time-reversal (and hence CP) symmetry breaking in the universe, which imposes severe constraints on theories of elementary particle physics. In a second example, the unusual improper geometric ferroelectric phase transition in the hexagonal manganites has been shown to have symmetry characteristics in common with proposed early universe phase transitions. As a result, the hexagonal manganites can be used to run experiments in the laboratory to test various aspects of early universe physics. In particular, a proposed mechanism for cosmic-string formation has been verified, and aspects of cosmic string evolution are being explored through observation of their multiferroic domain intersection analogues. Applications beyond magnetoelectricity A number of other unexpected applications have been identified in the last few years, mostly in multiferroic bismuth ferrite, that do not seem to be directly related to the coupled magnetism and ferroelectricity. These include a photovoltaic effect, photocatalysis, and gas sensing behaviour. It is likely that the combination of ferroelectric polarisation, with the small band gap composed partially of transition-metal d states are responsible for these favourable properties. Multiferroic films with appropriate band gap structure into solar cells was developed which results in high energy conversion efficiency due to efficient ferroelectric polarization driven carrier separation and overband spacing generation photo-voltage. Various films have been researched, and there is also a new approach to effectively adjust the band gap of the double perovskite multilayer oxide by engineering the cation order for Bi2FeCrO6. Dynamics Dynamical multiferroicity Recently it was pointed out that, in the same way that electric polarisation can be generated by spatially varying magnetic order, magnetism can be generated by a temporally varying polarisation. The resulting phenomenon was called Dynamical Multiferroicity. The magnetisation, is given by where is the polarisation and the indicates the vector product. The dynamical multiferroicity formalism underlies the following diverse range of phenomena: The phonon Zeeman effect, in which phonons of opposite circular polarisation have different energies in a magnetic field. This phenomenon awaits experimental verification. Resonant magnon excitation by optical driven phonons. Dzylaoshinskii-Moriya-type electromagnons. The inverse Faraday effect. Exotic flavours of quantum criticality. Dynamical processes The study of dynamics in multiferroic systems is concerned with understanding the time evolution of the coupling