Epitaxial Engineering of Domain Walls and Planar Rumpling
to Create a Strong Multiferroic.

Darrell G. Schlom

Department of Materials Science and Engineering and
Kavli Institute at Cornell for Nanoscale Science

Cornell University

The defining feature of ferroics is the ability of an external stimulus—electric field, magnetic field, or stress—to move domain walls. These topological defects and their motion enables many useful attributes, e.g., memories that can be reversibly written between stable states as well as enhanced conductivity, permittivity, permeability, and piezoelectricity. Although methods are known to drastically increase their density, the placement of domain walls with atomic precision has until now evaded control. We engineer the location of domain walls with monolayer precision and exploit this ability to create a novel multiferroic in which ferroelectricity enhances magnetism at all relevant length scales. Starting with hexagonal LuFeO₃, a geometric ferroelectric with the greatest known planar rumpling, we introduce individual extra monolayers of FeO during growth to construct formula-unit-thick syntactic layers of ferrimagnetic LuFe₂O₄ within the LuFeO₃ matrix, i.e., (LuFeO₃)_m(LuFe₂O₄)₁ superlattices. The severe rumpling imposed by the neighbouring LuFeO₃ drives the ferrimagnetic LuFe₂O₄ into a simultaneously ferroelectric state and reduces the LuFe₂O₄ spin frustration. This increases the magnetic transition temperature significantly—to 281 K for the (LuFeO₃)₉(LuFe₂O₄)₁ superlattice. Moreover, LuFeO₃ can form charged ferroelectric domain walls, which we align to the LuFe₂O₄ bilayers with monolayer precision. Charge transfers to these domain walls to alleviate the otherwise electrostatically unstable polarization arrangement, further boosting the magnetic moment. Our results demonstrate the utility of combining ferroics at the atomic-layer level with attention to domain walls, geometric frustration, and polarization doping to create multiferroics by design.