Effect of symmetry mismatch on the domain structure of rhombohedral BiFeO3 thin films

Abstract

Considerable work has focused on the use of epitaxial strain to engineer domain structures in ferroic materials. Here, we revisit the observed reduction of domain variants in rhombohedral BiFeO3 films on rare-earth scandate substrates. Prior work has attributed the reduction of domain variants to anisotropic in-plane strain, but our findings suggest that the monoclinic distortion of the substrate, resulting from oxygen octahedral rotation, is the driving force for variant selection. We study epitaxial BiFeO3 DyScO3 (110)o heterostructures with and without ultrathin, cubic SrTiO3 buffer layers as a means to isolate the effect of symmetry mismatch on the domain formation. Two variant stripe domains are observed in films grown directly on DyScO3, while four-variant domains are observed in films grown on SrTiO3 buffered DyScO3 when the buffer layer is >2 nm thick. This work provides insights into the role of the substrate beyond just lattice mismatch in manipulating and controlling domain structure evolution in materials.

17 pages

References in corpus (3)

• Suppression of Octahedral Tilts and Associated Changes of Electronic Properties at Epitaxial Oxide Heterostructure Interfaces
• Competing misfit relaxation mechanisms in epitaxial correlated oxides
• Effect of symmetry mismatch on the domain structure of rhombohedral BiFeO3 thin films

Cited by in corpus (9)

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• 180 degree Ferroelectric Stripe Nanodomains in BiFeO3 Thin Films
• The Effect of Polar Fluctuation and Lattice Mismatch on Carrier Mobility at Oxide Interfaces
• Electric-field Induced Reversible Switching of the Magnetic Easy-axis in Co/BiFeO3/SrRuO3/SrTiO3 Heterostructures
• Large Enhancement of Properties in Strained Lead-free Multiferroic Solid Solutions with Strong Deviation from Vegard's Law
• Control of polarization and polar chiral textures in BiFeO${}_3$ by epitaxial strain and interfacial chemistry
• In-plane quasi-single-domain BaTiO${}_3$ via interfacial symmetry engineering