Light-induced giant and persistent changes in the converse magnetoelastic effects in Ni/BaTiO3 multiferroic heterostructure

Magnetoelastic and magnetoelectric coupling in the artificial multiferroic heterostructures facilitate valuable features for device applications such as magnetic field sensors and electric write magnetic-read memory devices. In a ferromagnetic/ferroelectric heterostructures, the strain mediated coupling exploits piezoelectricity/electrostriction in ferroelectric phase and magnetostriction/piezomagnetism in ferromagnetic phase. Such verity of these combined effect can be manipulated by an external perturbation, such as electric field, temperature or magnetic field. Here, we demonstrate the remote-controlled tunability of these effects under the visible, coherent and polarized light. The combined surface and bulk magnetic study of domain-correlated Ni/BaTiO3 heterostructure reveals that the system is strong sensitive about the light illumination via the combined effect of converse piezoelectric, magnetoelastic coupling and converse magnetostriction. Well-defined ferroelastic domain structure is fully transferred from a tetragonal ferroelectric to magnetostrictive layer via interface strain transfer during the film growth. The visible light illumination is used to manipulate the original ferromagnetic microstructure by the light-induced domain wall motion in ferroelectric, consequently the domain wall motion in the ferromagnetic layer. Our findings mimic the attractive remote-controlled ferroelectric random-access memory write and magnetic random-access memory read application scenarios, hence, can be proven as a novel perspective for room temperature device applications.