Microstructural Evolution in Thin Films of Electronic Materials

Contains reports on eight research projects and a list of publications.National Science FoundationU.S. Air Force - Office of Scientific ResearchJoint Services Electronics Program Contract DAAL03-89-C-0001IBM CorporationHitachi CorporationSemiconductor Research CorporationNational Institutes of Healt

Microstructural Evolution in Thin Films of Electronic Materials

Contains reports on ten research projects.Joint Services Electronics Program Contract DAAL03-89-C-0001National Science FoundationU.S. Air Force - Office of Scientific Research Contract AFOSR 85-0154Semiconductor Research CorporationAT&TInternational Business Machines CorporationNational Institutes of Healt

Bundles of polytwins as meta-elastic domains in the thin polycrystalline simple multi-ferroic system PZT

Abstract We used enhanced piezo-response force microscopy (E-PFM) to investigate both ferroelastic and ferroelectric nanodomains in thin films of the simple multi-ferroic system PbZr 0.3 Ti 0.7 O 3 (PZT). We show how the grains are organized into a new type of elastic domain bundles of the well-known periodic elastic twins. Here we present these bundle domains and discuss their stability and origin. Moreover, we show that they can arrange in such a way as to release strain in a more effective way than simple twinning. Finally, we show that these bundle domains can arrange to form the macroscopic ferroelectric domains that constitute the basis of ferroelectric-based memory devices. (Some figures in this article are in colour only in the electronic version) Ferroelectric materials are intensively researched at the nanometre scale due to their pervasive applications in many fields, including non-volatile memory devices for single crystals, whereas in polycrystalline materials, the domain width decreases with the square root of the grain size Another way to express the contribution of polytwins to the strain is by taking into account the corrugation angle α they impose on the substrate due to the lattice constant difference between the a and c unit cells (sin(α)