Light-induced giant and persistent changes in the converse magnetoelastic effects in Ni/BaTiO3 multiferroic heterostructure

TL;DR

This study demonstrates that visible light can remotely and reversibly manipulate magnetoelastic effects in Ni/BaTiO3 heterostructures, enabling potential applications in memory devices through light-induced domain wall motion.

Contribution

It reveals a novel light-induced control of magnetoelastic coupling in multiferroic heterostructures at room temperature, combining optical and magnetic domain manipulation.

Findings

Light illumination induces domain wall motion in ferroelectric and ferromagnetic layers.

Magnetoelastic effects can be tuned remotely using visible light.

The system shows potential for room-temperature memory device applications.

Abstract

Magnetoelastic and magnetoelectric coupling in the artificial multiferroic heterostructures facilitate valuable features for device applications such as magnetic field sensors and electric write magnetic-read memory devices. In a ferromagnetic/ferroelectric heterostructures, the strain mediated coupling exploits piezoelectricity/electrostriction in ferroelectric phase and magnetostriction/piezomagnetism in ferromagnetic phase. Such verity of these combined effect can be manipulated by an external perturbation, such as electric field, temperature or magnetic field. Here, we demonstrate the remote-controlled tunability of these effects under the visible, coherent and polarized light. The combined surface and bulk magnetic study of domain-correlated Ni/BaTiO3 heterostructure reveals that the system is strong sensitive about the light illumination via the combined effect of converse piezoelectric, magnetoelastic coupling and converse magnetostriction. Well-defined ferroelastic domain structure is fully transferred from a tetragonal ferroelectric to magnetostrictive layer via interface strain transfer during the film growth. The visible light illumination is used to manipulate the original ferromagnetic microstructure by the light-induced domain wall motion in ferroelectric, consequently the domain wall motion in the ferromagnetic layer. Our findings mimic the attractive remote-controlled ferroelectric random-access memory write and magnetic random-access memory read application scenarios, hence, can be proven as a novel perspective for room temperature device applications.