Flexoelectric and photo-flexoelectricity are scientifically intriguing and hold considerable potential for various applications such as soft strain sensing, photovoltaics, energy harvesting, etc. Among flexoelectric materials, freestanding ferroelectric thin films are believed to have huge flexoelectricity and tunability due to their excellent lattice regulatory freedom and sustainability to larger strain gradients. In this work, we demonstrated a freestanding BiFeO₃(BFO) thin film-based soft strain sensor and explored their flexoelectric coefficient and flexoelectric photovoltaic effect under different strain gradients. Under different bending scales, the photocurrent of the thin film exhibits a step-like variation, indicating that the sensor can measure strain gradient with high sensitivity. These results show the potential application of freestanding ferroelectric films in flexible devices.

Achieving high thermoelectric performance in thin film heterostructures is essential for integrated and miniatured thermoelectric device applications. In this work, we demonstrate a mechanism and device performance of enhanced thermoelectric performance induced by interfacial effect in a transition metal dichalcogenides-SrTiO₃ (STO) heterostructure. Owing to the formed conductive interface and elevated conductivity, the ZrTe₂/STO heterostructure presents large thermoelectric power factor of 3.7 × 10⁵ μWcm⁻¹K⁻² at 10 K. Formation of quasi-two-dimensional conductance at the interface is attributed for the large Seebeck coefficient and high electrical conductivity, leading to high thermoelectric performance which is demonstrated by a prototype device attaining 3 K cooling with 100 mA current input to this heterostructure. This superior thermoelectric property makes this heterostructure a promising candidate for future thermoelectric device.

As a high-k material, hafnium oxide (HfO₂) has been used in gate dielectrics for decades. Since the discovery of polar phase in Si-doped HfO₂ films, chemical doping has been widely demonstrated as an effective approach to stabilize the ferroelectric phase in HfO₂ based thin films. However, the extra capping layer deposition, post-growth annealing and wake-up effect are usually required to arouse the ferroelectricity in HfO₂ based thin films, resulting in the increase of complexity for sample synthesis and the impediment of device application. In this study, the ferroelectricity is observed in non-capped dopant-free HfO₂ thin films prepared by pulsed laser deposition (PLD) without post-growth annealing. By adjusting the deposited temperature, oxygen pressure and thickness, the maximum polarization up to 14.7 μC/cm² was obtained in 7.4 nm-thick film. The fraction of orthorhombic phase, concentrations of defects and size effects are considered as possible mechanisms for the influences of ferroelectric properties. This study indicates that PLD is an effective technique to fabricate high-quality ferroelectric HfO₂ thin films in the absence of chemical doping, capping layer deposition and post-growth annealing, which may boost the process of nonvolatile memory device application.