Study of strain effect on in-plane polarization in epitaxial BiFeO3 thin films using planar electrodes

Abstract

Epitaxial strain plays an important role in determining physical properties of perovskite ferroelectric oxide thin films. However, it is very challenging to directly measure properties such as polarization in ultrathin strained films using traditional sandwich capacitor devices, because of high leakage current. We employed a planar electrode device with different crystallographical orientations between electrodes along different electric field orientation to directly measure the in-plane polarization-electric field (P-E) hysteresis loops in fully strained thin films. At high misfit strains such as -4.4%, the pure Tetrogonal-like phase is obtained and its polarization vector is constrained to lie in the (010) plane with a significantly large in-plane component, ~44 μC/cm2. First-principle calculations are carried out in parallel, and provide a good agreement with the experimental results. Our results pave the way to design in-plane devices based on T-like BFO and the strategy proposed here can be expanded to study all other similar strained multiferroic ultrathin films.

References in corpus (8)

• Very large spontaneous electric polarization in BiFeO3 single crystals at room temperature and its evolution under cycling fields
• Effect of epitaxial strain on the spontaneous polarization of thin film ferroelectrics
• Stress-induced R-MA-MC-T symmetry changes in BiFeO3 films
• Low-Symmetry Monoclinic Phases and Polarization Rotation Path Mediated By Epitaxial Strain in Multiferroic BiFeO3 Thin Films
• Structural distortion and magnetism of BiFeO3 epitaxial thin films: a Raman spectroscopy and neutron diffraction study
• Effect of epitaxial strain on ferroelectric polarization in multiferroic BiFeO3 films
• Coexistence of Ferroelectric Triclinic Phases and Origin of Large Piezoelectric Responses in Highly Strained BiFeO3 films
• Nanoscale domains in strained epitaxial BiFeO3 thin Films on LaSrAlO4 Substrate

Cited by in corpus (7)

• A multiferroic on the brink: uncovering the nuances of strain-induced transitions in BiFeO${}_3$
• Large tensile strain induced monoclinic MB phase in BiFeO3 epitaxial thin films on PrScO3 substrate
• Anisotropic optical properties of rhombohedral and tetragonal thin film BiFeO${}_3$ phases
• Domain and Phase De-strain - Formation of Ferroelastic Domain Structures
• Periodic elastic nanodomains in ultrathin tetrogonal-like BiFeO3 films
• Large Enhancement of Properties in Strained Lead-free Multiferroic Solid Solutions with Strong Deviation from Vegard's Law
• Novel magnetoelectric effects via penta-linear interactions