Events
Time: 03:40 p.m.
Place: Materials Day 2013, Ruhr-Universität Bochum, Bochum, Germany
Eric Bousquet, Department of Physics, University of Liege, Liège, Belgium
In the last two decades the growth control of thin films at the atomic scale has been afforded by modern deposition techniques. This achievement enabled the possibility of making new artificial materials by alternating and repeating the thin film growth of two or more materials on the top of each other. These artificial compounds are called superlattices and one of the motivations to grow them is to induce new interesting and exotic properties that are completely absent if we take apart the parent compounds.
These possibilities have been prospected with success in ferroelectric perovskite oxides, which will be the purpose of my talk. I will show that, in superlattices made of two different ferroelectric perovskite oxides, it is possible to modulate the properties of the two parent compounds when the layers are thick but when this thickness is small enough, interface effects dominate the physics of the system and they can induce new phenomena not present otherwise. I will focus on one of these new phenomena, the hybrid improper ferroelectricity, which is at the source of technologically relevant properties such as temperature independent dielectric responses or large magnetoelectric properties (coupling between the electric and magnetic properties).
