title: Tunable multiferroic and bistable/complementary resistive switching properties of dilutely Li-doped BiFeO3 nanoparticles: an effect of aliovalent substitution.
abstract: We report a potential way to enhance and tune the multiferroic and resistive switching properties of BiFeO3 nanoparticles through dilute aliovalent Li(1+) doping (0.046 atomic percent) at the Fe(3+) sites of BiFeO3. The high purity of the samples and the extent of doping were confirmed by different physical characterizations. Enhanced multiferroic properties with a magnetic moment per Fe atom ≈ 0.12 μB and electric polarization ≈ 49 μC cm(-2) were observed in one of the Li(1+) doped samples. A phenomenological model has been proposed to support the observed magnetic behavior of the doped samples. From a potential application point of view, we further report on the doping concentration and polarization coercivity dependent highly stable resistive switching behavior (endurance cycles >10(3) and stability >10(6) s) of Li-doped BiFeO3 nanoparticles. The stable complementary resistive switching behavior (1 bit operation) for >50 cycles and under voltage pulse for 10(3) cycles in the doped BiFeO3 at a low operating bias is reported. Thus, dilute aliovalent Li(1+) doping enables tunability of the ferroic and resistive switching properties of BiFeO3and shows it to be a promising multiferroic material.
authors.affiliation: Hefei National Laboratory for Physical Sciences at the Microscale, University of Science and Technology of China, Hefei, Anhui 230026, People's Republic of China. mandar@ustc.edu.cn mmshirolkar@gmail.com hqwang@ustc.edu.cn.
authors.forename: Mandar M
authors.initials: MM
authors.lastname: Shirolkar
authors.forename: Changshan
authors.initials: C
authors.lastname: Hao
authors.forename: Xiaolei
authors.initials: X
authors.lastname: Dong
authors.forename: Ting
authors.initials: T
authors.lastname: Guo
authors.forename: Lei
authors.initials: L
authors.lastname: Zhang
authors.forename: Ming
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Li
authors.forename: Haiqian
authors.initials: H
authors.lastname: Wang