Ferroic Transition Metal Oxide Nano-heterostructures: From Fundamentals to Applications

Nanostructured transition metal oxides (TMOs) showing a ferroic order have attracted a great deal of attention over the last two decades both for fundamental studies and for technological applications in different fields, such as information storage/processing, sensors, biomedicine, and energy. The strong coupling between charge, spin, orbital, and lattice symmetry in complex TMOs gives rise to a wide range of physical properties, including magnetism, ferroelectricity, piezoelectricity, multiferroicity, and colossal magnetoresistance, which can be finely tuned by varying the chemical composition and crystal structure. Spurred by recent advances in synthesis and characterization techniques, the interfacial effect in heterostructures combining two or more different oxides has emerged as a powerful tool to further engineer the final properties in ferroic oxides. Following a brief overview on the ferroic properties of nanostructured complex TMOs, topical examples of different nanostructured oxide heterostructures and their potential applications will be illustrated.