  The advent of caloric materials for magnetocaloric, elastocaloric, and
electrocaloric cooling is changing the landscape of solid state cooling
technologies with potentials for high-efficiency and environmentally-friendly
residential and commercial cooling as well as heating applications. Given that
caloric materials are ferroic materials which undergo first (or second) order
transitions near room temperature, they open up intriguing possibilities for
novel multiferroic devices with hitherto unexplored functionalities coupling
their thermal properties with different fields (magnetic, electric, and stress)
through composite configurations. Here, we demonstrate a composite
magneto-elastocaloric effect with ultra-low magnetic field (0.16 T) in a
compact geometry to generate a cooling temperature change as large as 4 K using
a magnetostriction/superelastic alloy composite. Such composite systems can be
used to circumvent shortcomings of existing technologies such as the need for
high-stress actuation mechanism for elastocaloric materials and the high
magnetic-field requirement of magnetocaloric materials, while enabling new
applications such as compact remote cooling devices.
