Wilfrid Prellier

Abstract:

Transition metal oxides often having a perovskite structure form a wide and technologically important class of compounds. In these systems, ferroelectric, ferromagnetic, ferroelastic, or even orbital and charge orderings can develop and eventually coexist. These orderings can be tuned by external electric, magnetic, or stress field, and the cross-couplings between them enable important multifunctional properties, such as piezoelectricity, magneto-electricity, or magneto-elasticity. Here, will illustrate with different examples of utilization of oxide films. First, by growing PrVO3 thin films epitaxially on an SrTiO3 substrate, I will show that the role of oxygen vacancies can be rationalized to introduce a chemical strain similar to the so-called mechanical strain (±2%), which in turns produce a nontrivial evolution of Néel temperature in a range of 30 K. I will also present the effect of thickness, and other substrates. Second, I will show that they can also be used as bio-adaptive surfaces, a field of research which is clearly unexplored. For this, we prepared a series of oxide thin films by the pulsed laser deposition technique, grown mesenchymal stem cells on these surfaces, and studied their adhesion and proliferation. We will discuss the feasibility of different thin films to promote appearance of multicellular structures with a better performance in terms of cell proliferation. These results will confirm the potential of such materials for various applications in electronic or medicine.