Extrinsic Size Effect in Piezoresponse Force Microscopy of Thin Films

Abstract

The extrinsic size effect in Piezoresponse Force Microscopy of ferroelectric and piezoelectric thin films on non-polar dielectric substrate is analyzed. Analytical expressions for effective piezoresponse, object transfer function components, and Rayleigh two-point resolution are obtained. These results can be broadly applied for effective piezoelectric response calculations in thin piezoelectric and ferroelectric films as well as surface polar layers e.g. in organic materials and bio-polymers. In particular, the effective piezoresponse strongly decreases with film thickness whereas the sharpness of domain stripes image increases due to the object transfer function spectrum broadening.

16 pages, 5 figures; To be submitted to Phys. Rev. B-Rapid Communications

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Cited by in corpus (8)

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• Piezoresponse Force Spectroscopy of Ferroelectric Materials
• Nanoscale Electromechanics of Paraelectric Materials with Mobile Charges: Size effects and Nonlinearity of Electromechanical Response of SrTiO3 Films
• The Piezoresponse Force Microscopy of surface layers and thin films: effective response and resolution function
• Local Polarization Switching in the Presence of Surface Charged Defects: Microscopic Mechanisms and Piezoresponse Force Spectroscopy Observations
• Landau-Ginzburg-Devonshire theory for electromechanical hysteresis loop formation in piezoresponse force microscopy of thin films
• Self-consistent theory of nanodomain formation on non-polar surfaces of ferroelectrics
• Local hard and soft pinning of 180${}^{\circ }$ domain walls in BaTiO${}_3$ probed by in situ transmission electron microscopy