Ideal barriers to polarization reversal and domain-wall motion in strained ferroelectric thin films

Abstract

The ideal intrinsic barriers to domain switching in c-phase PbTiO_3 (PTO), PbZrO_3 (PZO), and PbZr_{1-x}Ti_xO_3 (PZT) are investigated via first-principles computational methods. The effects of epitaxial strain on the atomic structure, ferroelectric response, barrier to coherent domain reversal, domain-wall energy, and barrier to domain-wall translation are studied. It is found that PTO has a larger polarization, but smaller energy barrier to domain reversal, than PZO. Consequentially the idealized coercive field is over two times smaller in PTO than PZO. The Ti--O bond length is more sensitive to strain than the other bonds in the crystals. This results in the polarization and domain-wall energy in PTO having greater sensitivity to strain than in PZO. Two ordered phases of PZT are considered, the rock-salt structure and a (100) PTO/PZO superlattice. In these simple structures we find that the ferroelectric properties do not obey Vergard's law, but instead can be approximated as an average over individual 5-atom unit cells.

9 pages, 13 figures

References in corpus (3)

• Physics of thin-film ferroelectric oxides
• First-principles study of epitaxial strain in perovskites
• Epitaxially strained [001]-(PbTiO${}_3$)${}_1$(PbZrO${}_3$)${}_1$ superlattice and PbTiO${}_3$ from first principles

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