%0 Journal Article
%A V Nagarajan
%A C.S Ganpule
%A H Li
%A L Salamanca-Riba
%A A.L Roytburd
%A E.D Williams
%A Ramamoorthy Ramesh
%B Applied Physics Letters
%D 2001
%G eng
%P 2805-2807
%R 10.1063/1.1402645
%T Control of domain structure of epitaxial PbZr0.2Ti0.8O3 thin films grown on vicinal (001) SrTiO3 substrates
%V 79
%X 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.