Large room-temperature spontaneous exchange bias effect in LaFeO3 micro-polyhedrons

Single-phase materials with exchange bias (EB) effect at room temperature (RT) are very important for future applications in spintronic devices, magnetic storage, and sensors. To explore materials showing the EB effect at RT is an interesting and important issue. In this paper, LaFeO3 micro-polyhedrons composed of an average particle size of 66 nm nanoparticles have been synthesized by annealing LaFe(CN)6 precursors in air at 630 degrees C for 8 h. Magnetic hysteresis loops show that LaFeO3 micro-polyhedrons present a large spontaneous EB (SEB) effect (similar to 1.5 kOe) at RT after zero-field cooling (ZFC) and a gigant conventional EB (CEB) effect (similar to 5.6 kOe) after field cooling (FC) of 70 kOe. To the best of our knowledge, the current compound shows the largest negative EB field after ZFC at RT among SEB materials discovered so far. The successful fitting of training effect (TE) data with Binek's model shows that the origin of SEB lies in the interface exchange coupling between different magnetic phases. The interface with the "pinning" effect of antiferromagnetic (AFM) matrix relative to ferromagnetic (FM) clusters exhibits unidirectional anisotropy, which is formed during the initial magnetization process. This interesting finding of the SEB effect at RT in single-phase perovskite LaFeO3 system may open a new direction for possible technological applications.