Electronic structures and magnetic studies of SmFeO3 thin films and powders

•SmFeO3 thin films and SmFeO3 powders were prepared for comparison.•XAS spectra were studied by to elucidate the magnetic properties of the samples.•SmFeO3 thin films showed quite weak exchange bias effect.•The influence of orbital hybridization on the magnetism were investigated. In this work, the electronic structures and magnetic performance of SmFeO3 (SFO) powders prepared by standard solid-state reaction route and thin films fabricated by pulsed laser deposition (PLD) on SrTiO3 (STO) (100) substrates were investigated.The X-ray diffraction (XRD) investigations prove the phase purity of both SmFeO3 powders and thin films. X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy (XPS) was employed to study the chemical composition and the valence states of elements. With the purpose of studying the electronic structure of SFO samples, especially the orbital hybridization in the samples, X-ray absorption Spectroscopy (XAS)were also accomplished. Remarkably, we observed the difference in XAS of OK-edgeand FeL-edge between SmFeO3 powders and thin films. It was observed that the samples exhibited different exchange bias effect (EB) from magnetization investigations, which were probably dependent on the changes of the orbital hybridization and bond length of the samples.