Ferroelectric or non-ferroelectric: Why so many materials exhibit "ferroelectricity" on the nanoscale

By Rama K. Vasudevan, N. Balke, P. Maksymovych, Stephen Jesse, Sergei V. Kalinin. 2017

300 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Ferroelectric materials have remained one of the major focal points of condensed matter physics and materials science for over 50 years. In the last 20 years, the development of voltage-modulated scanning probe microscopy techniques, exemplified by Piezoresponse force microscopy (PFM) and associated time- and voltage spectroscopies, opened a pathway to explore these materials on a single-digit nanometer level. Consequently, domain structures and walls and polarization dynamics can now be imaged in real space. More generally, PFM has allowed studying electromechanical coupling in a broad variety of materials ranging from ionics to biological systems. It can also be anticipated that the recent Nobel prize [“The Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2016,” http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/chemistry/laureates/2016/ (Nobel Media, 2016)] in molecular electromechanical machines will result in rapid growth in interest in PFM as a method to probe their behavior on single device and device assembly levels. However, the br...

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

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/d57c9d476ec8c5b433ed3b6b36537318d8651b83