Chapters authored
Electrical Properties of Epitaxial Ferroelectric Heterostructures
In the context of miniaturization of devices, ferroelectric materials are used as multifunctional materials for their well-known intrinsic properties, especially for the switching of polarization in an applied electric field. The high-quality epitaxial thin film structures are used for the possibility to study different effects as low dimensions, interface, strain and strain gradients on ferroelectric materials and other electric characteristics, also representing a possibility to obtain new phenomena and properties that can be used for development of new devices with different functionalities. This chapter is a summary of the ferroelectric and dielectric behaviour of epitaxial thin films of Pb(Zr,Ti)O3 (PZT) and BaTiO3 (BTO) obtained by pulsed laser deposition and the correlation with structural quality of the layers and with different electrostatic conditions induced either by electrodes or by the different interlayers. For this purpose in the first part, studies regarding the influence of the substrates and of different top electrodes are performed for Pb(Zr,Ti)O3 (PZT) 52/48. In the second part, we focused on artificial multiferroic structures from alternating layers of PZT 20/80 or BaTiO3 (BTO) as ferroelectric phase and CoFe2O4 (CFO) as magnetic material. We found that interface configuration and strain engineering could control ferroelectric hysteresis, the capacitance or the leakage current magnitude.
Part of the book: Epitaxy