Facilitation of Ferroelectric Switching via Mechanical Manipulation of Hierarchical Nanoscale Domain Structures

Zibin Chen; Liang Hong; Feifei Wang; Simon P Ringer; Long-Qing Chen; Haosu Luo; Xiaozhou Liao

doi:10.1103/PhysRevLett.118.017601

Facilitation of Ferroelectric Switching via Mechanical Manipulation of Hierarchical Nanoscale Domain Structures

Phys Rev Lett. 2017 Jan 6;118(1):017601. doi: 10.1103/PhysRevLett.118.017601. Epub 2017 Jan 6.

Authors

Zibin Chen¹, Liang Hong², Feifei Wang³, Simon P Ringer^{1

4}, Long-Qing Chen², Haosu Luo⁵, Xiaozhou Liao¹

Affiliations

¹ School of Aerospace, Mechanical and Mechatronic Engineering, The University of Sydney, Sydney, New South Wales 2006, Australia.
² Department of Materials Science and Engineering, Pennsylvania State University, University Park, Pennsylvania 16802, USA.
³ Key Laboratory of Optoelectronic Material and Device, Department of Physics, Shanghai Normal University, Shanghai 200234, China.
⁴ Australian Institute for Nanoscale Science and Technology, The University of Sydney, New South Wales 2006, Australia.
⁵ Key Laboratory of Inorganic Functional Materials and Devices, Shanghai Institute of Ceramics, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Shanghai 200050, China.

PMID: 28106439
DOI: 10.1103/PhysRevLett.118.017601

Abstract

Heterogeneous ferroelastic transition that produces hierarchical 90° tetragonal nanodomains via mechanical loading and its effect on facilitating ferroelectric domain switching in relaxor-based ferroelectrics were explored. Combining in situ electron microscopy characterization and phase-field modeling, we reveal the nature of the transition process and discover that the transition lowers by 40% the electrical loading threshold needed for ferroelectric domain switching. Our results advance the fundamental understanding of ferroelectric domain switching behavior.