MAGIMOX · Nanometre scale imaging of magnetic perovskite oxide thin films using scanning transmission electron microscopy
Horizon 2020 — Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions
- Duration
- 2019-04-01 → 2021-03-31
- EU contribution
- €166,320
- Participants
- 1
- Scheme
- MSCA-IF
Lines connect the coordinator with its partners.
Results in brief
Nanometre scale imaging of magnetic perovskite oxide thin films using scanning transmission electron microscopy
Functional properties in materials are an essential part of modern society, enabling a wide range of computing, information and sensor technologies. An example of functional materials are the magnetic ones, which is today used in several devices like hard drives for storing data, and sensors. In addition, magnetic properties have attracted a great deal of interest for new types of energy efficient device concepts. To improve these devices, and design new ones, there is a need to understand how these materials behave at nanometre length scales, since the interesting physics often arise there. However, there is a lack of experimental techniques for looking at the magnetic properties in these materials, especially at very small length scales. Another important factor is studying these properties across phase transitions. For example, magnetic materials become non-magnetic above certain temperatures, and seeing this change from magnetic to non-magnetic can reveal information about the underlying physical phenomena controlling device performance. Scanning Transmission Electron Microscopy (STEM) is a powerful imaging technique, which can study materials down to single atoms. However, historically it has mostly been used to study the structure and composition of materials, not their functional properties such as magnetic fields. With recent advances in fast pixelated STEM detectors, it has become possible to directly image the magnetic fields. However, much work remains, both in making this work practically on most STEM instruments, and making the technique work across a range of materials. MAGIMOX aimed to improve this, by utilizing the STEM in co-junction with the recently developed fast pixelated STEM detectors, to study both the structure and magnetic properties in perovskite oxide thin films. Thus the overall objective was to study these specific materials, however since these detectors were fairly new, a great deal of method and analysis software development was necessary.
Data: CORDIS, © European Union
Project objective
Magnetic materials are a vital part of modern society, being important components in technologies such as magnetic resonance imaging machines and hard disk drives. A common strategy to both improve existing technologies and develop new ones, is miniaturization. The most striking example being the billion-fold increase in silicon semiconductor transistor density, which fundamentally changed society since its invention in the 60ies. However, this miniaturization trend now seems to come to a slow-down as devices are shrinking to sizes where hard physical limits are setting in, and being able to image these nanoscale devices becomes ever more important. Scanning transmission electron microscopy (STEM) is a widely used imaging technique used to study such nanometre scale devices, however it does not readily provide imaging of the magnetic properties at this scale.The perovskite oxides form a materials family, which exhibits a wide range of properties including magnetism. A similar miniaturization process has been used for these materials, where making them as nanometre thick films revealed new phenomena. The most exciting being multiferroics, where an applied electric field can change the magnetic structure, and vice versa. This has attracted much interest in both making and studying these oxide materials, especially their magnetic properties, due to the great potential for new device concepts. However, due to the small sizes of these films they're often very hard to study, especially when it comes to their nanoscale magnetic structure. This action will take advantage of recently developed fast electron STEM detectors to image the nanometre scale magnetic structures of these materials directly with unprecedented resolution. Using a high-end STEM equipped with such a detector, both the magnetic and crystal structure will be studied in the same microscope. This will enable highly correlated studies of the perovskites, giving a deeper understanding of these new phenomena.
Original text from CORDIS.
Participants
- UNIVERSITEIT ANTWERPEN · AntwerpenCoordinatorBelgium
Links
Data: CORDIS, © European Union