Nanomechanical Explorations on Thin Freestanding Complex Oxide Membranes

The last two decades have seen enormous growth in the field of nanoengineering and nanomechanics using thin sheets due to the variety of 2D materials available. With new advances in thin film growth techniques, it is now possible to produce a new class of functional oxide crystalline thin films in freestanding form. This adds a whole arsenal of materials with enormous potential owing to the variety of physical properties that oxides can exhibit, ranging from ferroelectrics to semiconductors to magnets to superconductors, to be readily incorporated in nanomechanical implementations. In this talk I will present our foray into the world of nanomechanics with thin complex oxide membranes, which will be shown to behave completely differently mechanically from their bulk counterparts. I will discuss how we use atomic force microscopy to study the mechanical behavior of thin crystalline perovskite membranes in the elastic regime and for fracture and fatigue and how different physical phenomena affect these at the nanoscale. A variety of effects such as surface and strain gradient contributions become relevant at the nanoscale which allow for observation of physical phenomenon hard to discern at larger length scales. With growing interest in freestanding oxide membranes, these studies will provide a basis for future work on strain manipulation and engineering of complex oxide membranes and their heterostructures. 
References: 1. C. Androulidakis et al., 2D Mater. 5, 032005 (2018) / 2. D. Lu et al., Nat. Mater. 15, 1255–1260 (2016) / 3. V. Harbola et al., Nano Lett. 21, 2470-2475 (2021)

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