At the ferroelectric surface, the broken translational symmetry induced bound charge should significantly alter the local atomic configurations. Experimentally revealing the atomic structure of ferroelectric surface, however, is very challenging due to the strong spatial variety between nano-sized domains, and strong interactions between the polarization and other structural parameters. Here, w...

An x-ray-diffraction method that directly senses the phase of the structure factor is demonstrated and used for determining the local polarity of thin ferroelectric films. This method is based on the excitation of an x-ray standing-wave field inside the film as a result of the interference between the strong incident x-ray wave and the weak kinematically Bragg-diffracted x-ray wave from the fil...

Ferroelectric Bi4Ti3012 thin films have been grown on MgO ( 100) and MgO( 110) substrates by the pulsed laser deposition. X-ray diffraction studies show that the films on both substrates have preferential crystallographic orientation such that most of their c axes are close to the substrate normal direction. The film on MgO( 110) shows quadratic and hysteretic electro-optic characteristics with...

A generalized Ginzburg-Landau-Devonshire free energy has been used to describe the influence of imperfect surface layers or interface layers in ferroelectric thin films. The natural boundary condition has been employed in solving the polarization profile, which can reflect a more realistic situation compared to the previous treatments of the same problem using the so-called extrapolation length...

We investigate theoretically ferroelastic domain fractions in a heteroepitaxial bilayer consisting of 001 tetragonal PbZrxTi1−xO3 and 001 rhombohedral PbZr1−xTixO3 on a thick 001 passive substrate as a function of the lattice misfit strain between layers and the substrate. By considering the self-strain in each layer and the indirect elastic interaction between the layers, we provide a numerica...

We analyze the interaction of an electromagnetic spike (one cycle) with a thin layer of ferroelectric medium with two equilibrium states. The model is the set of Maxwell equations coupled to the undamped LandauKhalatnikov equation, where we do not assume slowly varying envelopes.

Ferroelectric perovskite oxides possess large electrocaloric effect, but only at high temperature, which limits their potential as next generation solid state cooling devices. Here, we demonstrate from phase field simulations that a giant adiabatic temperature change exhibits near room temperature in the strained ferroelectric PbTiO₃ nanotubes, which is several times in magnitude larger than th...