Liquid-phase Epitaxial Growth of BiFeO 3 Thick Films using an Infrared Irradiation
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Liquid-phase Epitaxial Growth of BiFeO3 Thick Films using an Infrared Irradiation Takeshi Kawae1, Mitsuhiro Shiomoto1, Hisashi Tsuda1, Satoru Yamada2, Masanori Nagao3, Akiharu Morimoto1, and Minoru Kumeda1 1 Kanazawa University, Kanazawa, 920-1192, Japan 2 Ishikawa National College of Technology, Kahoku-gun, 920-0392, Japan 3 National Institute for Material Science, Tsukuba, 305-0047, Japan ABSTRACT Epitaxial BiFeO3 (BFO) thick films were fabricated on SrTiO3 (STO) substrates by a simple liquid-phase epitaxy (LPE) growth technique. To avoid the evaporation of Bi, in this process, we used the lid substrate. As starting materials, we used calcined powder or amorphous films deposited by pulsed laser ablation. The fabricated films were found to have a single perovskite phase and be (100)-oriented. Cube-on-cube epitaxial growth of film on the STO substrate was also confirmed by φ-scan measurements. The films grown on the substrate display a multigrain structure with a maximum in-plane size of approximately 100µm, and the film thickness was about 3-35 µm. The interface structure between the film and the substrate was relatively smooth. These results indicate that the proposed simple LPE technique is highly suitable for the fabrication of BFO thick films. INTRODUCTION BiFeO3 (BFO) have attracted much attention due to the coexistence of ferroelectric and magnetic orders. It has high Curie (~1100K) and Neel (~673K) temperatures. Recently, there were some reports that epitaxial thin films possessed unique properties including excellent ferro/piezoelectric properties [1-5], comparable to those of Pb(ZrxTi1-x)O3 (PZT). Although PZT is widely used for various ferro/piezoelectric applications, the toxicity of Pb in the PZT causes serious environmental problems. Thus, BFO will be used as an alternative Pb-free ferro/piezoelectric material. For functional electric device applications, high-quality BFO thin films have been actively developed by various deposition techniques, such as pulsed laser deposition and chemical solution deposition [3-5]. However, there has been no report on the fabrication of BFO thick films, which are important for piezoelectric applications. Liquid-phase epitaxy (LPE) method is well known to be a promising technique for preparing thick films. In fact, some singlephase BFO specimens (thin films and bulk crystals) have been obtained by various liquid-phase growth techniques [6-9]. Hence, the development of technology for the fabrication of BFO thick films by liquid-phase growth is significant. However, in conventional liquid-phase growth, evaporation of part of the raw materials from the liquid-phase, which causes the formation of unexpected phases, is a serious problem. Thus, we attempted the liquid-phase growth of BFO films without the occurrence of such problems by using a lid substrate during the melting. In thispaper, we report the epitaxial growth of BFO thick films by a simple LPE technique using a lid substrate.
EXPERIMENT LPE growth of BFO was carried out from by our simple growth tec
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