Investigations into Compositionally Modulated Magnetoelectric Gallium Ferrite for Sensor and Transducer Applications

PI: Prof. Ashish Garg

Co-PI: Prof. Rajeev Gupta

This project aims at exploring Gallium ferrite which is a known piezoelectric and ferrimagnetic material. The recent work demonstrated that the material also possesses significant magnetoelectric coupling as well as nanoscale ferroelectricity at or above room temperature making it a technologically important material, especially for applications related to sensors and transducers. However, despite all these attractive features, the biggest bottleneck to its device utility is its higher electrical leakage in both bulk and thin film form whose mechanism remains unknown. This project envisages to first understand the mechanism of electrical leakage in gallium ferrite by carrying out detailed impedance spectroscopy. Subsequently, defect chemistry as well as microstructure of gallium ferrite by judicious substitution of cations in the material in the bulk form to reduce the electrical leakage. This will be followed by studies on selected compositions used in thin film form of Metal Insulator-Metal (MIM) capacitor configuration for studying the device characteristics at a few 100 nm thin film scale. The eventual goal of the project is to develop high insulation gallium ferrite to enable sensor and actuator devices for a variety of applications.