%0 Journal Article
%K Atomic force microscopy
%K Polarization
%K Ferroelectric materials
%K Imaging techniques
%K Polarization reversal
%K Polycrystalline materials
%K Dielectric films
%K Random walk process
%A A Gruverman
%A H Tokumoto
%A A.S Prakash
%A S Aggarwal
%A B Yang
%A M Wuttig
%A Ramamoorthy Ramesh
%A O Auciello
%A T Venkatesan
%B Applied Physics Letters
%D 1997
%G eng
%I American Institute of Physics Inc.
%P 3492-3494
%R 10.1063/1.120369
%T Nanoscale imaging of domain dynamics and retention in ferroelectric thin films
%V 71
%X We report results on the direct observation of the microscopic origins of backswitching in ferroelectric thin films. The piezoelectric response generated in the film by a biased atomic force microscope tip was used to obtain static and dynamic piezoelectric images of individual grains in a polycrystalline material. We demonstrate that polarization reversal occurs under no external field (i.e., loss of remanent polarization) via a dispersive continuous-time random walk process, identified by a stretched exponential decay of the remanent polarization. © 1997 American Institute of Physics.