Evolution of ferroelectric properties in SmxBi1-xFeO3 via automated Piezoresponse Force Microscopy across combinatorial spread libraries

TL;DR

This study uses automated Piezoresponse Force Microscopy to explore ferroelectric properties across a compositional library of SmxBi1-xFeO3, revealing how these properties evolve and establishing a theoretical framework for high-throughput materials analysis.

Contribution

It introduces an automated PFM methodology combined with combinatorial libraries to efficiently study ferroelectric evolution in SmxBi1-xFeO3, advancing high-throughput materials characterization.

Findings

Identified concentration-dependent ferroelectric parameters.

Developed a Ginzburg-Landau based model for property evolution.

Provided open data sets for community use.

Abstract

Combinatorial spread libraries offer a unique approach to explore evolution of materials properties over the broad concentration, temperature, and growth parameter spaces. However, the traditional limitation of this approach is the requirement for the read-out of functional properties across the library. Here we demonstrate the application of automated Piezoresponse Force Microscopy (PFM) for the exploration of the physics in the SmxBi1-xFeO3 system with the ferroelectric-antiferroelectric morphotropic phase boundary. This approach relies on the synergy of the quantitative nature of PFM and the implementation of automated experiments that allows PFM-based gird sampling over macroscopic samples. The concentration dependence of pertinent ferroelectric parameters has been determined and used to develop the mathematical framework based on Ginzburg-Landau theory describing the evolution of these properties across the concentration space. We pose that combination of automated scanning probe microscope and combinatorial spread library approach will emerge as an efficient research paradigm to close the characterization gap in the high-throughput materials discovery. We make the data sets open to the community and hope that will stimulate other efforts to interpret and understand the physics of these systems.