Strain Engineering: A Pathway for Tunable Functionalities of Perovskite Metal Oxide Films

Perovskite offers a framework that boasts various functionalities and physical properties of interest such as ferroelectricity, magnetic orderings, multiferroicity, superconductivity, semiconductor, and optoelectronic properties owing to their rich compositional diversity. These properties are also uniquely tied to their crystal distortion which is directly affected by lattice strain. Therefore, many important properties of perovskite can be further tuned through strain engineering which can be accomplished by chemical doping or simply element substitution, interface engineering in epitaxial thin films, and special architectures such as nanocomposites. In this review, we focus on and highlight the structure-property relationships of perovskite metal oxide films and elucidate the principles to manipulate the functionalities through different modalities of strain engineering approaches.