Mechanisms of electromechanical coupling in strain based scanning probe microscopy

By Q. Chen, Y. Ou, Feiyue Ma, Jiangyu Li. 2014

146 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Electromechanical coupling is ubiquitous in nature and underpins the functionality of materials and systems as diverse as ferroelectric and multiferroic materials, electrochemical devices, and biological systems, and strain-based scanning probe microscopy (s-SPM) techniques have emerged as a powerful tool in characterizing and manipulating electromechanical coupling at the nanoscale. Uncovering underlying mechanisms of electromechanical coupling in these diverse materials and systems, however, is a difficult outstanding problem, and questions and confusions arise from recent experiment observations of electromechanical coupling and its apparent polarity switching in some unexpected materials. We propose a series of s-SPM experiments to identify different microscopic mechanisms underpinning electromechanical coupling and demonstrate their feasibility using three representative materials. By employing a combination of spectroscopic studies and different modes of s-SPM, we show that it is possible to distinguish electromechanical coupling arising from spontaneous polarization, induced dipole moment, and ionic Vegard strain, and this offers a clear guidance on using s-SPM to study a wide variety of functional materials and systems.

Subfields: Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics, Materials Chemistry

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/014815afef504fd1ed21782115eac2cd22b12d2b

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In Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics

1. Qi Yu
2. Yunseok Kim
3. Jiangyue Li
4. Bora Kim
5. Q. Chen
6. Jing-Feng Li
7. Daehee Seol
8. S. Xie

In Materials Chemistry

1. Yunseok Kim
2. Bora Kim
3. Daehee Seol

Citations in the corpus

• Non-piezoelectric effects in piezoresponse force microscopy (2017, methodology): “This fact implies that the EM response produced by electrochemical strain is potentially misinterpreted as that produced by the piezoresponse.[95-97]”
• Strain-based scanning probe microscopies for functional materials, biological structures, and electrochemical systems (2015, methodology): “outlined a few methods to distinguish different microscopic mechanisms responsible for s-SPM response [26].”