Large enhancement of ferroelectric properties of perovskite oxides via nitrogen incorporation

Tao Wang; Fenghui Gong; Xue Ma; Shen Pan; Xian-Kui Wei; Changyang Kuo; Suguru Yoshida; Yu-Chieh Ku; Shuai Wang; Zhenni Yang; Sankalpa Hazra; Kelvin H L Zhang; Xingjun Liu; Yunlong Tang; Yin-Lian Zhu; Chun-Fu Chang; Sujit Das; Xiuliang Ma; Lang Chen; Bin Xu; Venkatraman Gopalan; Laurent Bellaiche; Lane W Martin; Zuhuang Chen

doi:10.1126/sciadv.ads8830

Large enhancement of ferroelectric properties of perovskite oxides via nitrogen incorporation

Sci Adv. 2025 Jan 10;11(2):eads8830. doi: 10.1126/sciadv.ads8830. Epub 2025 Jan 10.

Authors

Tao Wang¹, Fenghui Gong², Xue Ma³, Shen Pan¹, Xian-Kui Wei⁴, Changyang Kuo^{5

6}, Suguru Yoshida⁷, Yu-Chieh Ku⁵, Shuai Wang¹, Zhenni Yang⁴, Sankalpa Hazra⁷, Kelvin H L Zhang⁴, Xingjun Liu¹, Yunlong Tang², Yin-Lian Zhu², Chun-Fu Chang⁸, Sujit Das⁹, Xiuliang Ma², Lang Chen¹⁰, Bin Xu³, Venkatraman Gopalan⁷, Laurent Bellaiche^{11

12}, Lane W Martin^{13

14}, Zuhuang Chen¹

Affiliations

¹ State Key Laboratory of Advanced Welding and Joining of Materials and Structures, School of Materials Science and Engineering, Harbin Institute of Technology, Shenzhen 518055, China.
² Shenyang National Laboratory for Materials Science, Institute of Metal Research, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Shenyang 110016, China.
³ Jiangsu Key Laboratory of Frontier Material Physics and Devices, School of Physical Science and Technology, Soochow University, Suzhou 215006, China.
⁴ College of Chemistry and Chemical Engineering, Xiamen University, Xiamen 361005, China.
⁵ Department of Electrophysics, National Yang Ming Chiao Tung University, Hsinchu 30010, Taiwan.
⁶ National Synchrotron Radiation Research Center, 101 Hsin-Ann Road, Hsinchu 30076, Taiwan.
⁷ Materials Research Institute and Department of Material Science & Engineering, Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA 16802, USA.
⁸ Max-Planck Institute for Chemical Physics of Solids, Nöthnitzer Str. 40, 01187 Dresden, Germany.
⁹ Materials Research Centre, Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore 560012, India.
¹⁰ Department of Physics, Southern University of Science and Technology, Shenzhen 518055, China.
¹¹ Physics Department and Institute for Nanoscience and Engineering, University of Arkansas, Fayetteville, AR 72701, USA.
¹² Department of Materials Science and Engineering, Tel Aviv University, Ramat Aviv, Tel Aviv 6997801, Israel.
¹³ Department of Materials Science and Engineering, University of California, Berkeley, CA 94720, USA.
¹⁴ Materials Sciences Division, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Berkeley, CA 94720, USA.

PMID: 39792673
DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.ads8830

Abstract

Perovskite oxides have a wide variety of physical properties that make them promising candidates for versatile technological applications including nonvolatile memory and logic devices. Chemical tuning of those properties has been achieved, to the greatest extent, by cation-site substitution, while anion substitution is much less explored due to the difficulty in synthesizing high-quality, mixed-anion compounds. Here, nitrogen-incorporated BaTiO₃ thin films have been synthesized by reactive pulsed-laser deposition in a nitrogen growth atmosphere. The enhanced hybridization between titanium and nitrogen induces a large ferroelectric polarization of 70 μC/cm² and high Curie temperature of ~1213 K, which are ~2.8 times larger and ~810 K higher than in bulk BaTiO₃, respectively. These results suggest great potential for anion-substituted perovskite oxides in producing emergent functionalities and device applications.