American Institute of Physics, Applied Physics Letters, 4(100), p. 042406
DOI: 10.1063/1.3679101
Full text: Unavailable
In this work, we propose to study the magnetic and ferroelectric configurations in ferroelectric multidomain BiFeO3 single crystals. Using x-ray (magnetic) linear dichroism in a photoemission electron microscope (X-PEEM), we are able to directly image both the antiferromagnetic and ferroelectric domains. We find that inside one single ferroelectric domain several antiferromagnetic domains coexist. This is different from what was observed on epitaxial thin films, where the ferroelectric domains perfectly match the antiferromagnetic ones, but also from previous neutron measurements on ferroelectric monodomain single-crystals for which one single antiferromagnetic domain was identified. This underlines the fundamental differences between thin films, bulk samples, and single versus ferroelectric multidomain samples.