Enhancement of polarization and related properties in heteroepitaxially constrained thin films of the ferroelectromagnet, BiFeO3, is reported. Structure analysis indicates that the crystal structure of film is monoclinic in contrast to bulk, which is rhombohedral. The films display a room-temperature spontaneous polarization (50 to 60 microcoulombs per square centimeter) almost an order of magnitude higher than that of the bulk (6.1 microcoulombs per square centimeter). The observed enhancement is corroborated by first-principles calculations and found to originate from a high sensitivity of the polarization to small changes in lattice parameters. The films also exhibit enhanced thickness-dependent magnetism compared with the bulk. These enhanced and combined functional responses in thin film form present an opportunity to create and implement thin film devices that actively couple the magnetic and ferroelectric order parameters.

We report on the coupling between ferroelectric and magnetic order parameters in a nanostructured BaTiO3-CoFe2O4 ferroelectromagnet. This facilitates the interconversion of energies stored in electric and magnetic fields and plays an important role in many devices, including transducers, field sensors, etc. Such nanostructures were deposited on single-crystal SrTiO3 (001) substrates by pulsed laser deposition from a single Ba-Ti-Co-Fe-oxide target. The films are epitaxial in-plane as well as out-of-plane with self-assembled hexagonal arrays of CoFe2O4 nanopillars embedded in a BaTiO3 matrix. The CoFe2O4 nanopillars have uniform size and average spacing of 20 to 30 nanometers. Temperature-dependent magnetic measurements illustrate the coupling between the two order parameters, which is manifested as a change in magnetization at the ferroelectric Curie temperature. Thermodynamic analyses show that the magnetoelectric coupling in such a nanostructure can be understood on the basis of the strong elastic interactions between the two phases.

Entropy-based image thresholding has received considerable interest in recent years. Two types of entropy are generally used as thresholding criteria: Shannon's entropy and relative entropy, also known as Kullback -Leibler information distance, where the former measures uncertainty in an information source with an optimal threshold obtained by maximising Shannon's entropy, whereas the latter measures the information discrepancy between two different sources with an optimal threshold obtained by minimising relative entropy. Many thresholding methods have been developed for both criteria and reported in the literature. These two entropybased thresholding criteria have been investigated and the relationship among entropy and relative entropy thresholding methods has been explored. In particular, a survey and comparative analysis is conducted among several widely used methods that include Pun and Kapur's maximum entropy, Kittler and Illingworth's minimum error thresholding, Pal and Pal's entropy thresholding and Chang et al.'s relative entropy thresholding methods. In order to objectively assess these methods, two measures, uniformity and shape, are used for performance evaluation.

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