Well-saturated ferroelectric polarization in PbTiO3-SmFeO3 thin filmsElectronic supplementary information (ESI) available. See DOI: 10.1039/c6qi00321d

A chemical solution deposition technique was applied to fabricate single-phase 0.9PbTiO 3 -0.1SmFeO 3 thin films on Pt/Ti/SiO 2 /Si substrates. The film was determined as a tetragonal perovskite structure by synchrotron radiation grazing incident X-ray diffraction (GI-XRD). A well saturated ferroelectric hysteresis loop, free from obvious change from room temperature to 120 °C, was achieved with a large remanent polarization (2 P r 130 μC cm −2 ). A weak magnetic nature was also observed, with a saturated magnetization ( M s ) 3 emu cc −1 . X-ray absorption spectra (XAS) and X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy (XPS) techniques were employed to detect the oxygen vacancies and study the bonding states of the film. Introduction to the international collaboration On the occasion of attending the 14th International IUPAC Conference on High Temperature Materials Chemistry in 2012, Dr Nina Ilinykle (Ural Technical Institute of Telecommunications and Informatics, Russia) visited Beijing and started to cooperate with Dr Xing's group. Our common interests involve phase thermal stability, phase structure and thermodynamic modeling of functional inorganic materials. Large remanent polarization in PbTiO 3 -SmFeO 3 thin films with distinct a -domains.