Date of Award

12-14-2015

Document Type

Open Access Thesis

Department

Physics and Astronomy

First Advisor

Yanwen Wu

Abstract

Multiferroic materials enable the exploration of electrical control of magnetic properties and vice versa. Their increasing interest is especially due to their potential applications in the industry of information storage. Thanks to recent progress in nanotechnology, they have also been found to have many other applications such as transducers and sensors, and they already occupy a unique place in the biomedical field. The objective of this project is to study multiferroic nanofibers made of cobalt ferrite CoFe2O4 (CFO) and barium titanate BaTiO3 (BTO) with a specific focus in the characterization of the ferroelectric phase. We researched the state of knowledge concerning the size effects on phase transition for nanoparticles and polycrystals BTO. The ferroelectric phase transition of BTO occurs when it changes from a tetragonal (anisotropic) crystal structure to a cubic (isotropic) structure. This change suggests that optical second harmonic generation (SHG) is a good measurement technique for monitoring the phase transition of the BTO half of the nanofibers. We designed and prepared a temperature dependent SHG experiment on magnetically aligned fibers in transmission with the possibility to investigate the polarization dependence of the signal. We also prepared interdigital electrodes on glass for the future study of the fibers in an external electric field.

Rights

© 2015, Katia Gasperi

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