Large energy storage density performance of epitaxial BCT/BZT heterostructures via interface engineering

Amrit P Sharma; Dhiren K Pradhan; Sangram K Pradhan; Messaoud Bahoura

doi:10.1038/s41598-019-53358-0

Large energy storage density performance of epitaxial BCT/BZT heterostructures via interface engineering

Sci Rep. 2019 Nov 14;9(1):16809. doi: 10.1038/s41598-019-53358-0.

Authors

Amrit P Sharma¹, Dhiren K Pradhan², Sangram K Pradhan³, Messaoud Bahoura³

Affiliations

¹ Center for Materials Research, Norfolk State University, 700 Park Avenue, Norfolk, VA, 23504, USA. a.p.sharma@spartans.nsu.edu.
² Geophysical Laboratory, Carnegie Institution for Science, Washington D.C., 20015, USA.
³ Center for Materials Research, Norfolk State University, 700 Park Avenue, Norfolk, VA, 23504, USA.

Abstract

We grew lead-free BaZr_0.2Ti_0.8O₃ (BZT)/Ba_0.7Ca_0.3TiO₃ (BCT) epitaxial heterostructures and studied their structural, dielectric, ferroelectric and energy density characteristics. The BZT/BCT epitaxial heterostructures were grown on SrRuO₃ (SRO) buffered SrTiO₃ (STO) single crystal substrate by optimized pulsed laser deposition (PLD) technique. These high-quality nanostructures exhibit high dielectric permittivity (∼1300), slim electric field-dependent polarization (P-E) curve with high saturation polarization (∼100 µC/cm²) and low remnant polarization (∼20 µC/cm²) through interface engineering to develop new lead-free ferroelectric system for energy storage devices. We observe an ultrahigh discharge and charge energy densities of 42.10 and 97.13 J/cm³, respectively, with high efficiency, which might be highly promising for both high power and energy storage electrical devices.