Bastien Grosso wins Poster Prize
Congratulations! Bastien Grosso, PhD student at the Materials Theory Group, won a poster prize at the Sixth MaTh-Cryst school in Bogotà (26.11.-01.12.18).
The prize has been awarded for Bastien's fabulous poster entitled "Stabilisation of a new antiferroelectric phase in oxide heterostructure with (La,Bi)FeO3" during the Intern. School on Fundamental Crystallography, Sixth MaThCryst school in Latin America; Workshop on the Applications of Group Theory in the Study of Phase Transitions, Bogotá.
Stabilisation of a new antiferroelectric phase in oxide heterostructure with (La,Bi)FeO3
While the ground state of bulk BFO is the rhombohedral ferroelectric R3c phase, many low-energy phases have been identified computationally, and some of them have been stabilized experimentally using epitaxial strain. Here we show that electrostatic confinement in thin-film heterostructures can also be used to stabilize new phases, and that these phases can have new interesting properties that do not occur in the bulk ground state. Using DFT calculations, we predict a new antipolar phase of BFO and find that the energy barrier to convert it into a ferroelectric phase is small enough for it to be a candidate antiferroelectric.
