Light-Controlled Magnetoelastic Effects in Ni/BaTiO3 Heterostructures

Magnetoelastic and magnetoelectric coupling in the artificial multiferroic heterostructures facilitate valuable features for device applications such as magnetic field sensors and electric-write magnetic-read memory devices. In ferromagnetic/ferroelectric heterostructures, the intertwined physical properties can be manipulated by an external perturbation, such as an electric field, temperature, or a magnetic field. Here, we demonstrate the remote-controlled tunability of these effects under visible, coherent, and polarized light. The combined surface and bulk magnetic study of domain-correlated Ni/BaTiO3 heterostructures reveals that the system shows strong sensitivity to the light illumination via the combined effect of piezoelectricity, ferroelectric polarization, spin imbalance, magnetostriction, and magnetoelectric coupling. A well-defined ferroelastic domain structure is fully transferred from a ferroelectric substrate to the magnetostrictive layer via interface strain transfer. The visible light illumination is used to manipulate the original ferromagnetic microstructure by the light-induced domain wall motion in ferroelectric substrates and consequently the domain wall motion in the ferromagnetic layer. Our findings mimic the attractive remote-controlled ferroelectric random-access memory write and magnetic random-access memory read application scenarios, hence facilitating a perspective for room temperature spintronic device applications.