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Interaction between dipoles often emerges intriguing physical phenomena, such as exchange bias in the magnetic heterostructures and magnetoelectric effect in multiferroics, which lead to advances in multifunctional heterostructures.…
Defect chemistry, strain, and structural, magnetic and electronic degrees of freedom constitute a rich space for the design of functional properties in transition metal oxides. Here, we show that it is possible to engineer polarity and…
Symmetry engineering is explicitly effective to manipulate and even create phases and orderings in strongly correlated materials. Flexural stress is universally practical to break the space-inversion or time-reversal symmetry. Here, by…
The role of defects in solids of mixed ionic-covalent bonds such as ferroelectric oxides is complex. Current understanding of defects on ferroelectric properties at the single-defect level remains mostly at the empirical level, and the…
Mechanical displacement in commonly used piezoelectric materials is typically restricted to linear or biaxial in nature and to a few percent of the material dimensions. Here, we show that free-standing BaTiO$_3$ membranes exhibit…
The synthesis of materials with well-controlled composition and structure improves our understanding of their intrinsic electrical transport properties. Recent developments in atomically controlled growth have been shown to be crucial in…
Solid solution BiFe1-xCoxO3 shows anti-ferromagnetic order and pyroelectric order, simultaneously. It has been known that BiFe1-xCoxO3 exhibits a structural phase transition between monoclinic and tetragonal phases as x increases. This…
Engineering oxygen octahedra rotation patterns in $ABO_3$ perovskites is a powerful route to design functional materials. Here we propose a strategy that exploits point defects that create local electric dipoles and couple to the oxygen…
Defect engineering has brought about a unique level of control for Si-based semiconductors, leading to the optimization of various opto-electronic properties and devices. With regard to perovskite transition metal oxides, oxygen vacancies…
In ABO3 perovskites, oxygen octahedron rotations are common structural distortions that can promote large ferroelectricity in BiFeO3 with an R3c structure [1], but suppress ferroelectricity in CaTiO3 with a Pbnm symmetry [2]. For many…
Artificial crystals synthesized by atomic-scale epitaxy provides the ability to control the dimensions of the quantum phases and associated phase transitions via precise thickness modulation. In particular, reduction in dimensionality via…
Sliding ferroelectrics, which exhibit out-of-plane polarization arising from specific stacking rather than conventional ionic displacements, are new types of ferroelectrics whose underdeveloped physics needs to be explored. Here, we…
Defect engineering using self-doping or creating vacancies in polycrystalline oxide based materials has profound influence on optical absorption, UV photo detection, and electrical switching. However, defects induced semiconducting oxide…
The recent observation of a ferroelectric-like structural transition in metallic LiOsO$_3$ has generated a flurry of interest in the properties of polar metals. Such materials are thought to be rare because free electrons screen out the…
Dislocations in perovskite oxides have important impacts on their physical and chemical properties, which are determined by their unique atomic environments. In the present study, the structure of dislocations in a 10{\deg} low-angle grain…
In the development of active animate materials, electromechanical coupling is highly attractive to realize mechanoresponsive functionality. Piezoelectricity is the most utilized electromechanical phenomenon due to the wide availability of…
Functional properties of ferroelectrics and their change with time depend crucially on the defect structure. In particular, point defects and bias fields induced by defect dipoles modify the field hysteresis and play an important role in…
For the ferroelectric perovskite compounds BaTiO3 and PbTiO3, we have studied the effects of external electric fields on the structural properties of the (001) surfaces. The field-induced changes in the surface interlayer spacings and…
Ferroelectric switching governs the functional properties of ferroelectric perovskites. It is widely accepted that this switching depends on domain nucleation and pinning and that these processes can be controlled by the defect structure.…
BiFeO3 is a model multiferroic in which the ferroelectric polarization is coupled to ferroelastic lattice distortions, yet deterministic control of its domain structure remains limited by high switching fields and competing polarization…