Related papers: Surface control of flexoelectricity
The flexoelectric and electronic properties of zig-zag graphene nanoribbons are explored under mechanical bending using state of the art first principles calculations. A linear dependence of the bending induced out of plane polarization on…
The recently discovered ferroelectric nematic liquids incorporate to the functional combination of fluidity, processability and anisotropic optical properties of nematic liquids, an astonishing range of physical properties derived from the…
We calculate the properties of the 4$d$ ferromagnet SrRuO$_3$ in bulk and thin film form with the aim of understanding the experimentally observed metal to insulator transition at reduced thickness. Although the spatial extent of the 4$d$…
Epitaxial strain provides important pathways to control the magnetic and electronic states in transition metal oxides. However, the large strain is usually accompanied by a strong reduction of the oxygen vacancy formation energy, which…
Functional devices with ultrathin ferroelectric layers have been attracted as a promising candidate for next-generation memory and logic device applications. Using the ultrathin ferroelectric layers, particularly approaching the…
Recent advances in moire engineering provide new pathways for manipulating lattice distortions and electronic properties in low-dimensional materials. Here, we demonstrate that twisted stacking can induce dipolar vortices in metallic SrRuO3…
Depositing disordered Al on top of SrTiO$_3$ is a cheap and easy way to create a two-dimensional electron system in the SrTiO$_3$ surface layers. To facilitate future device applications we passivate the heterostructure by a disordered…
A key property that drives research in ferroelectric perovskite oxides is their strong piezoelectric response in which an electric field is induced by an applied strain, and vice-versa for the converse piezoelectric effect. We have achieved…
First-principles calculations based on density-functional theory in the pseudo-potential approach have been performed for the total energy, crystal structure and cell polarization for SrTaO$_2$N/SrTiO$_3$ heterostructures. Different…
We report studies of ferroelectricity in ultra-thin perovskite films with realistic electrodes. The results reveal stable ferroelectric states in thin films less than 10 \AA thick with polarization normal to the surface. Under short-circuit…
Ferroelectric materials underlie key optical technologies in optical communications, integrated optics and quantum computing. Yet, there is a lack of a consistent thermodynamic framework to predict the optical properties of ferroelectrics…
An unexplored physical mechanism which produces a magnetoelectric effect in ferroelectric/ferromagnetic multilayers is studied based on first-principles calculations. Its origin is a change in bonding at the ferroelectric/ferromagnet…
The piezoelectric response is a measure of the sensitivity of a material's polarization to stress or its strain to an applied field. Using in-operando x-ray Bragg coherent diffraction imaging, we observe that topological vortices are the…
Nonlinear screening of electric depolarization fields, generated by a stripe domain structure in a ferroelectric grain of a polycrystalline material, is studied within a semiconductor model of ferroelectrics. It is shown that the maximum…
Layers of perovskites, found in 3D materials, 2D heterostructures, and nanotubes, often distort from high symmetry to facilitate dipole polarisation that is exploitable in many applications. Using density-functional theory calculations,…
Piezoelectrics interconvert mechanical energy and electric charge and are widely used in actuators and sensors. The best performing materials are ferroelectrics at a morphotropic phase boundary (MPB), where several phases can intimately…
We present a theory for surface polaritons on ferroelectric-antiferromagnetic materials with canted spin structure. Canting is assumed to be due to a Dzyaloshinkii-Moriya interaction with the electric polarisation and weak ferromagnetism…
Ferroelectric BiFeO3 thin films and artificial superlattices of (BiFeO3)m(SrTiO3)m (m~ 1 to 10 unit cells) were fabricated on (001)-oriented SrTiO3 substrates by pulsed laser ablation. The variation of leakage current and macroscopic…
We investigate the physical mechanisms for achieving an electrical control of conventional spin-singlet superconductivity in thin films by focusing on the role of surface orbital polarization. Assuming a multi-orbital description of the…
Based on a first-principles based multiscale approach, we study the polarity (P) of ferroelastic twin walls in SrTiO$_3$. In addition to flexoelectricity, which was pointed out before, we identify two new mechanisms that crucially…