In-plane charged antiphase boundary and 180° domain wall in a ferroelectric film

Xiangbin Cai; Chao Chen; Lin Xie; Changan Wang; Zixin Gui; Yuan Gao; Ulrich Kentsch; Guofu Zhou; Xingsen Gao; Yu Chen; Shengqiang Zhou; Weibo Gao; Jun-Ming Liu; Ye Zhu; Deyang Chen

doi:10.1038/s41467-023-44091-4

In-plane charged antiphase boundary and 180° domain wall in a ferroelectric film

Nat Commun. 2023 Dec 9;14(1):8174. doi: 10.1038/s41467-023-44091-4.

Authors

Xiangbin Cai^#^{1

2}, Chao Chen^#³, Lin Xie⁴, Changan Wang^{5

6}, Zixin Gui³, Yuan Gao⁷, Ulrich Kentsch⁵, Guofu Zhou³, Xingsen Gao³, Yu Chen⁸, Shengqiang Zhou⁵, Weibo Gao⁹, Jun-Ming Liu^{3

10}, Ye Zhu¹¹, Deyang Chen¹²

Affiliations

¹ Guangdong Provincial Key Laboratory of Optical Information Materials and Technology, and Institute for Advanced Materials, South China Academy of Advanced Optoelectronics, South China Normal University, Guangzhou, 510006, China. xcaiak@connect.ust.hk.
² Division of Physics and Applied Physics, School of Physical and Mathematical Sciences, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore, 637371, Singapore. xcaiak@connect.ust.hk.
³ Guangdong Provincial Key Laboratory of Optical Information Materials and Technology, and Institute for Advanced Materials, South China Academy of Advanced Optoelectronics, South China Normal University, Guangzhou, 510006, China.
⁴ Department of Physics, Southern University of Science and Technology, Shenzhen, 518055, China.
⁵ Helmholtz-Zentrum Dresden-Rossendorf, Institute of Ion Beam Physics and Materials Research, Dresden, 01328, Germany.
⁶ School of Electronics & Communication, Guangdong Mechanical and Electrical Polytechnic, Guangzhou, 510515, China.
⁷ State Key Laboratory of Nuclear Physics and Technology, School of Physics, Peking University, Beijing, 100871, China.
⁸ Institute of High Energy Physics, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, 100049, China.
⁹ Division of Physics and Applied Physics, School of Physical and Mathematical Sciences, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore, 637371, Singapore.
¹⁰ Laboratory of Solid State Microstructures and Innovation Center of Advanced Microstructures, Nanjing University, Nanjing, 210093, China.
¹¹ Department of Applied Physics, Research Institute for Smart Energy, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Hong Kong, China.
¹² Guangdong Provincial Key Laboratory of Optical Information Materials and Technology, and Institute for Advanced Materials, South China Academy of Advanced Optoelectronics, South China Normal University, Guangzhou, 510006, China. deyangchen@m.scnu.edu.cn.

^# Contributed equally.

Abstract

The deterministic creation and modification of domain walls in ferroelectric films have attracted broad interest due to their unprecedented potential as the active element in non-volatile memory, logic computation and energy-harvesting technologies. However, the correlation between charged and antiphase states, and their hybridization into a single domain wall still remain elusive. Here we demonstrate the facile fabrication of antiphase boundaries in BiFeO₃ thin films using a He-ion implantation process. Cross-sectional electron microscopy, spectroscopy and piezoresponse force measurement reveal the creation of a continuous in-plane charged antiphase boundaries around the implanted depth and a variety of atomic bonding configurations at the antiphase interface, showing the atomically sharp 180° polarization reversal across the boundary. Therefore, this work not only inspires a domain-wall fabrication strategy using He-ion implantation, which is compatible with the wafer-scale patterning, but also provides atomic-scale structural insights for its future utilization in domain-wall nanoelectronics.