Bismuth ferrite based thin films, nanofibers, and field effect transistor devices

In this research an attempt has been made to explore bismuth ferrite thin films with low leakage current and nanofibers with high photoconductivity. Thin films were deposited with pulsed laser deposition (PLD) method. An attempt has been made to develop thin films under different deposition parameters with following target compositions: i) 0.6BiFeO3-0.4(Bi0.5 K0.5)TiO3 (BFO-BKT) and ii) bi-layered 0.88Bi 0.5Na0.5TiO3-0.08Bi0.5K0.5TiO 3-0.04BaTiO3/BiFeO3 (BNT-BKT-BT/BFO). BFO-BKT thin film shows suppressed leakage current by about four orders of magnitude which in turn improve the ferroelectric and dielectric properties of the films. The optimum remnant polarization is 19 muC.cm-2 at the oxygen partial pressure of 300 mtorr. The BNT-BKT-BT/BFO bi-layered thin films exhibited ferroelectric behavior as: Pr = 22.0 muC.cm-2, Ec = 100 kV.cm-1 and epsilonr = 140. The leakage current of bi-layered thin films have been reduced two orders of magnitude compare to un-doped bismuth ferrite.;Bismuth ferrite nanofibers were developed by electrospinning technique and its electronic properties such as photoconductivity and field effect transistor performance were investigated extensively. Nanofibers were deposited by electrospinning of sol-gel solution on SiO2/Si substrate at driving voltage of 10 kV followed by heat treatment at 550 °C for 2 hours. The composition analysis through energy dispersive detector and electron energy loss spectroscopy revealed the heterogeneous nature of the composition with Bi rich and Fe deficient regions. X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy results confirmed the combination of Fe3+ and Fe2+ valence state in the fibers. The photoresponse result is almost hundred times higher for a fiber of 40 nm diameter compared to a fiber with 100 nm diameter. This effect is described by a size dependent surface recombination mechanism. A single and multiple BFO nanofibers field effect transistors devices were fabricated and characterized. Bismuth ferrite FET behaves as p-type semiconductor. The carrier mobility for a single nanofiber FET was found as 0.2 cm2/V.s at 100 V driving voltage, while the carrier mobility of multiple nanofibers FET was maintained at 10 V driving voltage.;The results of this study present the versatility of BFO in the form of thin films and nanofibers for different electronic applications such as ferroelectric memories, transistor and light sensor.