TY - JOUR
AU - V Nagarajan
AU - C.S Ganpule
AU - H Li
AU - L Salamanca-Riba
AU - A.L Roytburd
AU - E.D Williams
AU - Ramamoorthy Ramesh
AB - We have investigated the polydomain formation in 100-200-nm-thick PbZr0.2Ti0.8O3 epitaxial thin films on vicinally cut (100) oriented SrTiO3 substrates. Our results show that there is a preferential location of the nucleation of the a domains along the step edges of the underlying substrate. By piezo-response microscopy, we show that all a domains have their polarization aligned along the same direction. This result is in contrast to flat substrates where fourfold symmetry of a domains is observed. We observe that the critical thickness for a domain formation is much lower than that for PbZr0.2Ti0.8O3 films grown on flat substrates. We have developed a model based on minimization of elastic energy to describe the effect of localized stresses at step edges on the formation of a domains in the ferroelectric layer. © 2001 American Institute of Physics.
BT - Applied Physics Letters
DO - 10.1063/1.1402645
LA - eng
M1 - 17
N1 - cited By 25
N2 - We have investigated the polydomain formation in 100-200-nm-thick PbZr0.2Ti0.8O3 epitaxial thin films on vicinally cut (100) oriented SrTiO3 substrates. Our results show that there is a preferential location of the nucleation of the a domains along the step edges of the underlying substrate. By piezo-response microscopy, we show that all a domains have their polarization aligned along the same direction. This result is in contrast to flat substrates where fourfold symmetry of a domains is observed. We observe that the critical thickness for a domain formation is much lower than that for PbZr0.2Ti0.8O3 films grown on flat substrates. We have developed a model based on minimization of elastic energy to describe the effect of localized stresses at step edges on the formation of a domains in the ferroelectric layer. © 2001 American Institute of Physics.
PY - 2001
SP - 2805
EP - 2807
T2 - Applied Physics Letters
TI - Control of domain structure of epitaxial PbZr0.2Ti0.8O3 thin films grown on vicinal (001) SrTiO3 substrates
VL - 79
SN - 00036951
ER -