Interface engineering in ferroelectrics: From films to bulks

As an important branch of functional materials, ferroic materials, especially ferroelectrics have attracted increasing attention in decades. Because of the rising demand in industry, performances on single-phase-based ferroelectric materials seems to meet the bottleneck, studies on composites are becoming urgent now. Motivated by this, structure designing of composite materials was considered as a key factor for pursing better properties, yielding fruitful research work. Among those work, interfacial parts between different phases was always reported to play significant roles in such composite ferroelectrics, and the authors summed them up as the strategy of INTERFACE ENGINEERING. Being different from traditional reviews, which mostly introduce materials with certain system or function, this one focuses more on the utilizing of interfaces in different states of ferroelectrics such as: Tuning magnetoelectric coupling coefficient by terminated layer in epitaxial thin films; broadening Curie Temperature range by inducing interfacial stain; enhancing dielectric tunability by forming topological structures; increasing electrical breakdown strength introducing artificial interfaces, etc . Besides, deeper mechanisms of such performance optimizations were also digged out and explained, hoping to offer new ideas for exploiting the next-generation electronic materials and devices.