Nanoscale imaging of domain dynamics and retention in ferroelectric thin films

Authors

Alexei Gruverman, University of Nebraska-LincolnFollow
H. Tokumoto, Joint Research Center for Atom Technology (JRCAT), Higashi 1-1-4, Tsukuba, Ibaraki 305, Japan
A. S. Prakash, University of Maryland, College Park
S. Aggarwal, University of Maryland, College Park
B. Yang, University of Maryland, College Park
M. Wuttig, University of Maryland, College Park
R. Ramesh, University of Maryland, College Park
O. Auciello, Argonne National Laboratory, Materials Science Division, Argonne, Illinois
T. Venkatesan, University of Maryland, College Park

Date of this Version

12-15-1997

Comments

Published in Appl. Phys. Lett. 71 (24), 15 December 1997 0003-6951/97/71(24)/3492/3/$10.00. Copyright © 1997 American Institute of Physics. Used by permission.

Abstract

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.