Epitaxial Lift-Off of Centimeter-Scaled Spinel Ferrite Oxide Thin Films for Flexible Electronics

Mechanical flexibility of electronic devices has attracted much attention from research due to the great demand in practical applications and rich commercial value. Integration of functional oxide materials in flexible polymer materials has proven an effective way to achieve flexibility of functional electronic devices. However, the chemical and mechanical incompatibilities at the interfaces of dissimilar materials make it still a big challenge to synthesize high-quality single-crystalline oxide thin film directly on flexible polymer substrates. This study reports an improved method that is employed to successfully transfer a centimeter-scaled single-crystalline LiFe₅O₈ thin film on polyimide substrate. Structural characterizations show that the transferred films have essentially no difference in comparison with the as-grown films with respect to the microstructure. In particular, the transferred LiFe₅O₈ films exhibit excellent magnetic properties under various mechanical bending statuses and show excellent fatigue properties during the bending cycle tests. These results demonstrate that the improved transfer method provides an effective way to compose single-crystalline functional oxide thin films onto flexible substrates for applications in flexible and wearable electronics.