Intertwined ferroelectricity and photovoltaics in two-dimensional (2D) materials will enable the favorable improvement control of photovoltaic performances.

Title of Document: COMPLEX METAL OXIDE THIN FILM GROWTH BY METALORGANIC CHEMICAL VAPOR DEPOSITION Seung-Yeul Yang, Doctor of Philosophy, 2005 Directed By: Professor Ramamoorthy Ramesh, Department of Materials Science and Engineering The phenomenon of ferroelectricity recently attracted great attention with the successful advances in the development of thin-film fabrication. This development ena...

Domain boundary engineering endeavors to develop materials that contain localized functionalities inside domain walls, which do not exist in the bulk. Here we review multiferroic devices that are based on ferroelectricity inside ferroelastic domain boundaries. The discovery of polarity in CaTiO3 and SrTiO3 leads to new directions to produce complex domain patterns as templates for ferroic devices.

Ferroelectric materials can be used for the ferroelectric random access memory (FeRAM) For the miniaturization the thin film structures are used in general. However, there is the critical thickness of ferroelectric materials, below which ferroelectricity abruptly disappears. Besides, the depolarization field, the epitaxial strain, the termination of the ferroelectric film, and the electric file...

We present the main properties of ferroelectricity, with emphasis given to a specific family of hydrated ferroelectric crystals, which can serve as model systems for corresponding configurations in biology like the microtubules. An experimental method is described, which allows to establish the ferroelectric property of microtubules in suspension.

Optical second harmonic generation (SHG) is used as a noninvasive probe of two-dimensional (2D) ferroelectricity in Langmuir-Blodgett (LB) films of copolymer vinylidene fluoride with trifluorethylene. The surface 2D ferroelectric-paraelectric phase transition in the topmost layer of LB films and a thickness independent (almost 2D) transition in the bulk of these films are observed in temperatur...

The anisotropy of polarization in a 1D copper(II)-based coordination polymer was investigated experimentally and theoretically for the first time, revealing that the origin of the ferroelectricity and its anisotropic nature are closely related to the coordination geometry of the metal ion and the packing mode of the coordination polymer.