Antiferroelectric negative capacitance from a structural phase transition in zirconia
Abstract
Crystalline materials with broken inversion symmetry can exhibit a spontaneous electric polarization, which originates from a microscopic electric dipole moment. Long-range polar or anti-polar order of such permanent dipoles gives rise to ferroelectricity or antiferroelectricity, respectively. However, the recently discovered antiferroelectrics of fluorite structure (HfO and ZrO) are different: A non-polar phase transforms into a polar phase by spontaneous inversion symmetry breaking upon the application of an electric field. Here, we show that this structural transition in antiferroelectric ZrO gives rise to a negative capacitance, which is promising for overcoming the fundamental limits of energy efficiency in electronics. Our findings provide insight into the thermodynamically 'forbidden' region of the antiferroelectric transition in ZrO and extend the concept of negative capacitance beyond ferroelectricity. This shows that negative capacitance is a more general phenomenon than previously thought and can be expected in a much broader range of materials exhibiting structural phase transitions.
Cite
@article{arxiv.2104.10811,
title = {Antiferroelectric negative capacitance from a structural phase transition in zirconia},
author = {Michael Hoffmann and Zheng Wang and Nujhat Tasneem and Ahmad Zubair and Prasanna Venkat Ravindran and Mengkun Tian and Anthony Gaskell and Dina Triyoso and Steven Consiglio and Kanda Tapily and Robert Clark and Jae Hur and Sai Surya Kiran Pentapati and Milan Dopita and Shimeng Yu and Winston Chern and Josh Kacher and Sebastian E. Reyes-Lillo and Dimitri Antoniadis and Jayakanth Ravichandran and Stefan Slesazeck and Thomas Mikolajick and Asif Islam Khan},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2104.10811},
year = {2022}
}