Smearing of phase transition due to a surface effect or a bulk inhomogeneity in ferroelectric nanostructures

Abstract

The boundary conditions, customarily used in the Landau-type approach to ferroelectric thin films and nanostructures, have to be modified to take into account that a surface of a ferroelectric (FE) is a defect of the ``field'' type. The surface (interface) field is coupled to a normal component of polarization and, as a result, the second order phase transitions are generally suppressed and anomalies in response are washed out. In FE films with a compositional (grading) or some other type of inhomogeneity, the transition into a monodomain state is suppressed, but a transition with formation of a domain structure may occur.

arXiv comment5 pages, 1 figure; the effective bias field is very large, the estimate is added

References in corpus (5)

• Ab initio study of BaTiO3 and PbTiO3 surfaces in external electric fields
• Theory of polarization enhancement in epitaxial BaTiO${}_3$/SrTiO${}_3$ superlattices
• Abrupt appearance of the domain pattern and fatigue of thin ferroelectric films
• A Microscopic Model of Ferroelectricity in Stress-free PbTiO3 Ultrathin Films
• Formation and rapid evolution of domain structure at phase transitions in slightly inhomogeneous ferroelectrics and ferroelastics

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