A high-energy density antiferroelectric made by interfacial electrostatic engineering

Abstract

Dielectric capacitors hold a tremendous advantage for energy storage due to their fast charge/discharge times and stability in comparison to batteries and supercapacitors. A key limitation to today's dielectric capacitors, however, is the low storage capacity of conventional dielectric materials. To mitigate this issue, antiferroelectric materials have been proposed, but relatively few families of antiferroelectric materials have been identified to date. Here, we propose a new design strategy for the construction of lead-free antiferroelectric materials using interfacial electrostatic engineering. We begin with a ferroelectric material with one of the highest known bulk polarizations, BiFeO3. We show that by confining atomically-precise thin layers of BiFeO3 in a dielectric matrix that we can induce a metastable antiferroelectric structure. Application of an electric field reversibly switches between this new phase and a ferroelectric state, in addition, tuning of the dielectric layer causes coexistence of the ferroelectric and antiferroelectric states. Precise engineering of the structure generates an antiferroelectric phase with energy storage comparable to that of the best lead-based materials. The use of electrostatic confinement provides a new pathway for the design of engineered antiferroelectric materials with large and potentially coupled responses.

arXiv comment17 pages, 4 figures

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Cited by in corpus (5)

• Electrical control of magnetism by electric field and current-induced torques
• Superorders and acoustic modes folding in BiFeO${}_3$/LaFeO${}_3$ superlattices
• Physics-guided descriptors for prediction of structural polymorphs
• Combined electrostatic and strain engineering of BiFeO${}_3$ thin films at the morphotropic phase boundary
• Oxygen tilt-driven polar super-orders in BiFeO3-based superlattices