Saidur Rahman Bakaul

Herein, we examine the influence of controllable polarization reversal and built-in electric fields on pyroelectric and electrocaloric effects in a BaTiO₃ thin film using a modified indirect method. We find that the magnitude of the sample's change in polarization with temperature is sensitive to the degree of polarization reversal. The pyroelectric response is small at low fractions of switched polarization and grows larger by several factors as larger fractions of polarization are reversed. This polarization reversal-sensitive pyroelectric behavior is the result of an internal built-in field, which has the effect of destabilizing low fractions of switched polarization and producing diminished pyroelectric effect. Greater fractions of switched polarization are more stable against backswitching and permit a larger pyroelectric response. Our findings highlight a characterization method for polarization-dependent pyroelectric effects in ferroelectric thin films, where built-in field effects are also present.

Recently, freestanding complex oxide ferroelectric materials have gained attention due to their tremendous potential in electronic and mechanical engineering applications. Whether these materials in a freestanding form exhibit intrinsically different behavior than in a strongly bonded as-grown state is a topic of ongoing exploration. Several factors such as circuit configuration, substrates, and electronic measurement conditions can affect probing the intrinsic properties of these materials and complicate the conclusive outcome of such exploration. The importance of maintaining the same experimental conditions for a comparative study of these materials in as-grown and freestanding states is discussed here.

Bubble‐like domains, typically a precursor to the electrical skyrmions, arise in ultrathin complex oxide ferroelectric–dielectric–ferroelectric heterostructures epitaxially clamped with flat substrates. Here, it is reported that these specially ordered electric dipoles can also be retained in a freestanding state despite the presence of inhomogeneously distributed structural ripples. By probing local piezo and capacitive responses and using atomistic simulations, this study analyzes these ripples, sheds light on how the bubbles are stabilized in the modified electromechanical energy landscape, and discusses the difference in morphology between bubbles in freestanding and as‐grown states. These results are anticipated to be the starting point of a new paradigm for the exploration of electric skyrmions with arbitrary boundaries and physically flexible topological orders in ferroelectric curvilinear space.

Herein, we report a cryogenic-temperature study on the evolution of the ferroelectric properties of epitaxial Hf_0.5Zr_0.5O₂ thin films on silicon. Wake-up, endurance, and fatigue of these films are found to be intricately correlated, strongly hysteretic, and dependent on available thermal energy. Field-dependent measurements reveal a decrease in polarization with temperature, which has been determined not to be an intrinsic change of the material property, rather a demonstration of the increase in the coercive bias of the material. Our findings suggest that a deficiency in thermal energy suppresses the mobility of defects presumed to be oxygen vacancies during wake-up and trapped injected charge during fatigue, which is responsible for polarization evolution during cycling. This permits accelerated wake-up and fatigue effects at high temperatures where thermal energy is abundant but delays these effects at cryogenic temperatures.

Complex oxide-based ferroelectric tunnel junctions (FTJs) show excellent nonvolatile memory characteristics promising for emerging technology. However, integration of these epitaxially grown FTJs electrically with a silicon substrate remains challenging due to their incompatible lattice structures and poor electronic interfaces resulting from the direct synthesis techniques. Here, we present an epitaxial SrRuO₃/PbZr_0.2Ti_0.8O₃/SrRuO₃ FTJ integrated electrically with a doped silicon substrate after a layer transfer process. The tunnel currents of the FTJ on silicon show a large tunneling electroresistance (∼1 × 10⁵%) effect, which is explained by a numerical FTJ model incorporating pinned dipoles at the interfaces. This proof of concept of the integration of functional oxide heterostructures with silicon opens a pathway to beyond-CMOS computing devices using unconventional materials.

Ferroelectric domain walls in single‐crystal complex oxide thin films are found to be orders of magnitude slower when the interfacial bonds with the heteroepitaxial substrate are broken to create a freestanding film. This drastic change in domain wall kinetics does not originate from the alteration of epitaxial strain; rather, it is correlated with the structural ripples at mesoscopic length scale and associated flexoelectric effects induced in the freestanding films. In contrast, the effects of the bond‐breaking on the local static ferroelectric properties of both top and bottom layers of the freestanding films, such as domain wall width and spontaneous polarization, are modest and governed by the change in epitaxy‐induced compressive strain.

Deciphering the intrinsic magnetic domain-wall (DW) resistivity of manganite materials by typical low-field magnetoresistance measurement is flawed due to the addition of different galvanomagnetic effects such as, colossal magnetoresistance, Lorentz force magnetoresistance, and anisotropic magnetoresistance (AMR). In this paper, by taking the advantage of rotational anisotropy and the stable rotation of the DW planes in half-metallic manganite La0.7Sr0.3MnO3 film, we deploy a remanent state resistance measurement technique to exclude all the field-dependent spurious effects from the intrinsic DW resistivity. To further refine its magnitude, we calculate the remanent state DW AMR by exploiting the three-dimensional micromagnetic simulation, which reveals a comparable but opposite contribution to the positive DW resistivity. From these results, we estimate the intrinsic DW resistance-area product in La0.7Sr0.3MnO3 to be 1.9\ifmmode\times\else\texttimes\fi{}10$-${}15$\Omega${}\ifmmode\cdot\else\textperiodcentered\fi{}m2.