Domain engineering in BiFeO3 thin films

Abstract

Recent advances in synthesizing complex oxide epitaxial heterostructures with precise control in atomic scale have opened a new era of materials science and engineering research, enabling discoveries of novel physical phenomena even from materials that have been studied for a long time. The exquisite control of high-quality thin films through composition, defects, strain, and microstructure allows us to clearly distinguish intrinsic and extrinsic properties that were obscured by the limitation of sample quality. This is vividly exemplified by the recent research on bismuth ferrite (BiFeO3). Due to the moderately low symmetry of BiFeO3 with a rhombohedral structure, domain engineering, controlling the configuration of domains and domain walls, plays a critical role not only in understanding fundamental physics of electrical and magnetic properties, but also in inducing novel functionalities such as photovoltaic and photocatalysis. In this review, various ways to control domain structures of BiFeO3 will be described with the consequent modification in the physical properties of BiFeO3. This methodology can be expanded to other low-symmetric thin film materials for designing new functionalities. (C) 2017 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.