Combining half-metals and multiferroics into epitaxial heterostructures for spintronics

Abstract

We report on the growth of epitaxial bilayers of the La2/3Sr1/3MnO3 (LSMO) half-metallic ferromagnet and the BiFeO3 (BFO) multiferroic, on SrTiO3(001) by pulsed laser deposition. The growth mode of both layers is two-dimensional, which results in unit-cell smooth surfaces. We show that both materials keep their properties inside the heterostructures, i.e. the LSMO layer (11 nm thick) is ferromagnetic with a Curie temperature of ~330K, while the BFO films shows ferroelectricity down to very low thicknesses (5 nm). Conductive-tip atomic force microscope mappings of BFO/LSMO bilayers for different BFO thicknesses reveal a high and homogeneous resistive state for the BFO film that can thus be used as a ferroelectric tunnel barrier in tunnel junctions based on a half-metal.

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• Theoretical current-voltage characteristics of ferroelectric tunnel junctions
• Influence of parasitic phases on the properties of BiFeO3 epitaxial thin films
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Cited by in corpus (9)

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• Tunnel magnetoresistance and robust room temperature exchange bias with multiferroic BiFeO3 epitaxial thin films
• Epitaxial thin films of multiferroic Bi2FeCrO6 with B-site cationic order
• Shear effects in lateral piezoresponse force microscopy at 180${}^{\circ }$ ferroelectric domain walls
• Tunneling Anisotropic Magnetoresistance of Helimagnet Tunnel Junctions
• Polaronic transport induced by competing interfacial magnetic order in a La${}_{0.7}$Ca${}_{0.3}$MnO${}_3$/BiFeO${}_3$ heterostructure
• Toward accurate polarization estimation in nanoscopic systems
• Nanoscale structural characterization of manganite thin films integrated to silicon correlated with their magnetic and electric properties