In practice, the functional properties include large ferroelectric (FE) 12 and ferromagnetic (FM) moments, piezoelectric 12, elastic, dielectric responses 13, magnetoelectric, and spin-structural couplings 7, 14, 15, 16, 17, as well as tunable optical bandgap 18. In particular, in these quasi one-dimensional materials of superlattices, sharp interfaces are formed which are defined by the atomic-level flat surface terraces bringing two distinct parent oxides into one artificial material 8.Įquipped with the advanced synthesis techniques, scientists are now focusing on searching for materials with target properties. Based on these advanced epitaxial techniques, it has become a routine work to make oxide superlattices or heterostructures in the laboratories. Such a significant progress has been facilitated by the advent and the maturity of modern thin-film technology 9, for example, the pulsed laser deposition 10 and the molecular beam epitaxy 11. A large portion of recently synthesized materials are contributed by the so-called artificial materials which cannot naturally exist. Last few decades have witnessed the explosive growth of new materials 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8. In particular, focused discussions are made on the proper treatments of both mechanical and electric boundary conditions when the oxide thin-films and superlattices are theoretically modeled by first-principles computer simulations. The underlying physical mechanism enabling the enhanced functional properties, such as ferroelectricity and multiferroics, are briefly reviewed. In this article, we provide a short summary of the recently proposed epitaxial strain and interface design approaches for the functional artificial oxide heterostructures. From a joint effort from both experiment and theory, scientists are searching for new engineering methods or design rules so that the materials can be custom designed with desired functionalities in theory before the materials are actually synthesized by epitaxial growth technique in laboratory. In recent years, the inverse design of artificial materials, in the format of thin-films and superlattices, has been an active sub-field in material science.
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