Related papers: A method to study ageing of polydomain ferroelectr…
Ferroelectric HfO2 films are usually polycrystalline and contain a mixture of polar and nonpolar phases. This challenges the understanding and control of polar phase stabilization and ferroelectric properties. Several factors such as…
Phase decomposition is a well-known process leading to the formation of two-phase mixtures. Here we show that a strain imposed on a ferroelastic crystal promotes the formation of mixed phases and domains, i.e., domain and phase de-strain…
Semiconducting ferroelectric materials with low energy polarisation switching offer a platform for next-generation electronics such as ferroelectric field-effect transistors. Ferroelectric domains at symmetry-broken interfaces of transition…
We examine some of the optical properties of a metamaterial consisting of thin layers of alternating metal and dielectric. We can model this material as a homogeneous effective medium with anisotropic dielectric permittivity. When the…
We study ferroelectricity in thin films of pseudo-proper ferroelectrics such as the so-called spiral multiferroics. We find that this type of ferroelectricity stands better against depolarizing fields than conventional one. Its…
Atomic force microscopy was used to investigate ferroelectric switching and nanoscale domain dynamics in epitaxial PbZr0.2Ti0.8O3 thin films. Measurements of the writing time dependence of domain size reveal a two-step process in which…
The macroscopic dielectric permittivity of dielectric crystals is related to the microscopic atomic polarizability of constituent atoms by the known Clausius-Mossotti relation obtained in the middle of 19th century. We derive a similar…
Introducing structural and/or chemical heterogeneity into otherwise ordered crystals can dramatically alter material properties. Lead-based relaxor ferroelectrics are a prototypical example, with decades of investigation having connected…
Most non-ferroelectric two-dimensional materials can be endowed with so-called sliding ferroelectricity via non-equivalent homo-bilayer stacking, which is not applicable to mono-element systems like pure graphene bilayer with inversion…
We study theoretically the influence of the underlying domain microstructure on the electromechanical properties of ferroelectrics. Our calculations are based on a continuum approach that incorporates the long-range elastic and…
We study how the ferroelastic domain structure sets in in an epitaxial film of a material with second order proper ferroelastic transition. The domain structures considered are similar to either $a_{1}/a_{2}/a_{1}/a_{2}$ or $c/a/c/a$…
The finite screening length by real metallic electrodes, albeit very small (<1A), results in finite depolarizing field that tends to split the film into domains. In very thin ferroelectric films the domain structure reduces to sinusoidal…
Based on a modified Ising model in a transverse field we demonstrate that defect layers in ferroelectric thin films, such as layers with impurities, vacancies or dislocations, are able to induce a strong increase or decrease of the…
For forty years researchers on ferroelectric switching have used the Kay-Dunn theory to model the thickness-dependence of the coercive field; it works surprisingly well, despite the fact that it is based upon homogeneous nucleation and a…
The depolarization fields set up to due to uncompensated surface charges in a ferroelectric thin film can suppress the ferroelectric phase below a critical size. Recent experiments show that 180 degree domain structures can help to…
A Landau-Ginsburg-Devonshire-type nonlinear phenomenological theory is presented, which enables the thermodynamic description of dense laminar polydomain states in epitaxial ferroelectric thin films. The theory explicitly takes into account…
The normal ferroelectric to paraelectric phase transition in model ferroelectric materials such as BaTiO3 is typically characterized by a sharp, well-defined dielectric constant peak at a specific transition temperature. However, under…
Sliding ferroelectrics built from stacked nonpolar monolayers enable out-of-plane polarization and unconventional switching via interlayer sliding, yet the microscopic sliding dynamics remain unclear. Using machine-learning molecular…
Macroscopic descriptions of ferroelectrics have an obvious appeal in terms of efficiency and physical intuition. Their predictive power, however, has often been thwarted by the lack of a systematicp rocedure to extract the relevant…
Understanding the generation of mechanical stress in drying, particle-laden films is important for a wide range of industrial processes. The cantilever experiment allows the stress in a drying film that has been deposited onto a thin plate…