Abstract:

Epitaxial nanocomposites provide a pathway to produce tunable and improved properties that are often not accessible from the individual constituents. Over the years, new discoveries and major advances have been made to synthesize epitaxial nanocomposite films and to gain fundamental understanding of their physical properties such as ferromagnetism ferroelectricity, and multiferroicity. In this talk, I will overview our effort to understand, exploit, and control competing interactions of a range of epitaxial nanocomposite metal oxide films. Using both ferroelectric and ferromagnetic oxides as model systems, we have illustrated that certain physical properties of the materials could be systematically tuned by controlling the strain state of the epitaxial nanocomposite films. Our phase field simulations have suggested that the ultimate strain in the interested phase is related to the vertical interfacial area and interfacial dislocation density of the epitaxial nanocomposite films.