Regensburg 2022 – wissenschaftliches Programm

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KFM: Fachverband Kristalline Festkörper und deren Mikrostruktur

KFM 19: Ferroics – Domains and Domain Walls 2

KFM 19.3: Vortrag

Mittwoch, 7. September 2022, 15:40–16:00, H7

Interfacial Stabilization of Homochiral Ferroelectric Domain Walls in BiFeO3 — •Elzbieta Gradauskaite¹, Quintin N. Meier², Natascha Gray¹, Marco Campanini³, Marta D. Rossell³, Manfred Fiebig¹, and Morgan Trassin¹ — ¹Department of Materials, ETH Zurich, Switzerland — ²CEA Grenoble, LITEN, Grenoble, France — ³Electron Microscopy Center, Empa, Switzerland

Chirality is a concept central to all molecular interactions in biological systems. In the last decade its importance was also highlighted in condensed-matter physics, where spin textures at the homochiral ferromagnetic domain walls were shown to enable their deterministic current-driven motion. Nevertheless, only a few reports on polar chirality exist to this date, prompting increased research efforts on this important issue. Here, we report the stabilization of net chirality in BiFeO3 ferroelectric films grown on a fully in-plane-polarized ferroelectric layer of the Aurivillius phase. By introducing an in-plane-polarized epitaxial buffer we create polarization continuity and provide a symmetry breaking at the interface with the out-of-plane polarized BiFeO3. Scanning probe microscopy uncovers the stabilization of conceptually novel 251^∘ domain walls in BiFeO3. Their unusual chirality is likely associated with the ferroelectric analog to the Dzyaloshinskii-Moriya interaction in magnets. Thus, we demonstrate a simple design combining perpendicular polar anisotropies for the effective stabilization of homochiral textures in ferroelectric thin films.