Large bi-axial tensile strain effect in epitaxial BiFeO3 film grown on single crystal PrScO3

In-Tae Bae; Zachary R Lingley; Brendan J Foran; Paul M Adams; Hanjong Paik

doi:10.1038/s41598-023-45980-w

Large bi-axial tensile strain effect in epitaxial BiFeO₃ film grown on single crystal PrScO₃

Sci Rep. 2023 Nov 3;13(1):19018. doi: 10.1038/s41598-023-45980-w.

Authors

In-Tae Bae¹, Zachary R Lingley², Brendan J Foran², Paul M Adams³, Hanjong Paik^{4

5}

Affiliations

¹ Microeletronics Technology Department, The Aerospace Corporation, El Segundo, CA, 90009, USA. intae.bae@aero.org.
² Microeletronics Technology Department, The Aerospace Corporation, El Segundo, CA, 90009, USA.
³ Materials Processing Department, The Aerospace Corporation, El Segundo, CA, 90009, USA.
⁴ School of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Oklahoma, Norman, OK, 73019, USA.
⁵ Center for Quantum Research and Technology, University of Oklahoma, Norman, OK, 73019, USA.

Abstract

A BiFeO₃ film is grown epitaxially on a PrScO₃ single crystal substrate which imparts ~ 1.45% of biaxial tensile strain to BiFeO₃ resulting from lattice misfit. The biaxial tensile strain effect on BiFeO₃ is investigated in terms of crystal structure, Poisson ratio, and ferroelectric domain structure. Lattice resolution scanning transmission electron microscopy, precession electron diffraction, and X-ray diffraction results clearly show that in-plane interplanar distance of BiFeO₃ is the same as that of PrScO₃ with no sign of misfit dislocations, indicating that the biaxial tensile strain caused by lattice mismatch between BiFeO₃ and PrScO₃ are stored as elastic energy within BiFeO₃ film. Nano-beam electron diffraction patterns compared with structure factor calculation found that the BiFeO₃ maintains rhombohedral symmetry, i.e., space group of R3c. The pattern analysis also revealed two crystallographically distinguishable domains. Their relations with ferroelectric domain structures in terms of size and spontaneous polarization orientations within the domains are further understood using four-dimensional scanning transmission electron microscopy technique.

Abstract

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