ﻻ يوجد ملخص باللغة العربية
The successful theoretical prediction and experimental demonstration of hybrid improper ferroelectricity (HIF) provides a new pathway to couple octahedral rotations, ferroelectricity, and magnetism in complex materials. To enable technological applications, a HIF with a small coercive field is desirable. We successfully grow Sr3Sn2O7 single crystals, and discover that they exhibit the smallest electric coercive field at room temperature among all known HIFs. Furthermore, we demonstate that a small external stress can repeatedly erase and re-generate ferroelastic domains. In addition, using in-plane piezo-response force microscopy, we characterize abundant charged and neutral domain walls. The observed small electrical and mechanical coercive field values are in accordance with the results of our first-principles calculations on Sr3Sn2O7, which show low energy barriers for both 90{deg} and 180{deg} polarization switching compared to those in other experimentally demonstrated HIFs. Our findings represent an advance towards the possible technological implemetation of functional HIFs.
In hybrid improper ferroelectric systems, polarization arises from the onset of successive nonpolar lattice modes. In this work, measurements and modeling were performed to determine the spatial symmetries of the phases involved in the transitions to
In this contribution to the special issue on magnetoelectrics and their applications, we focus on some single phase multiferroics theoretically predicted and/or experimentally discovered by the authors in recent years. In these materials, iron is the
We report the relationship between epitaxial strain and the crystallographic orientation of the in-phase rotation axis and A-site displacements in Pbnm-type perovskite films. Synchrotron diffraction measurements of EuFeO3 films under strain states ra
Improper ferroelectrics are described by two order parameters: a primary one, driving a transition to long-range distortive, magnetic or otherwise non-electric order, and the electric polarization, which is induced by the primary order parameter as a
Ferroic materials are well known to exhibit heterogeneity in the form of domain walls. Understanding the properties of these boundaries is crucial for controlling functionality with external stimuli and for realizing their potential for ultra-low pow