Polar Properties and Hysteresis Loops in Multilayered Thin Films Ferroelectric/Virtual Ferroelectric

TL;DR

This study uses Landau-Ginzburg-Devonshire theory to analyze how misfit strains, surface energy, and size effects influence phase diagrams, polar properties, and hysteresis loops in multilayered ferroelectric/virtual ferroelectric thin films, revealing new stable phases.

Contribution

It introduces a comprehensive analysis of multilayered SrTiO₃/BaTiO₃ films, identifying six stable BaTiO₃ phases and examining the effects of layer thickness and elastic strain on polar properties.

Findings

Six thermodynamically stable BaTiO₃ phases in multilayered films.

Polar properties strongly depend on layer thickness and elastic misfit strains.

Thicker SrTiO₃ layers increase depolarization fields, reducing spontaneous polarization.

Abstract

In the framework of Landau--Ginzburg--Devonshire (LGD) phenomenological theory, the influence of misfit strains, surface energy, and finite-size effects on phase diagrams, polar properties, and hysteresis loops has been calculated for multilayered thin films of the type ferroelectric/virtual ferroelectric. The influence of elastic deformations that arise at the interface thin film--substrate owing to a mismatch between the lattice constants in the film and the substrate on the phase diagrams of multilayered thin films virtual ferroelectric SrTiO$_{3}$/ferroelectric BaTiO$_{3}$ has been studied for the first time. In contrast to bulk BaTiO$_{3}$, in which only four phases (cubic, tetragonal, orthorhombic, and rhombohedral) can exist, it turned out that six thermodynamically stable BaTiO$_{3}$ phases (paraelectric phase and tetragonal (FEc), two monoclinic (FEaac and FEac), and two orthorhombic (FEa and FEaa) ferroelectric phases) can exist in multilayered SrTiO$_{3}$/BaTiO$_{3}$ films. The main polar properties of hysteresis loops (shape, coercive field, and spontaneous polarization) in thin multilayered SrTiO$_{3}$/BaTiO$_{3}$ films are calculated. It is shown that the system demonstrates a strong dependence of its polar properties on the thickness of SrTiO$_{3}$ and BaTiO$_{3}$ layers, as well as on the elastic misfit strains, with SrTiO$_{3}$ playing the role of dielectric layer: the thicker the layer, the stronger is the depolarization field, which, in its turn, reduces the spontaneous polarization in the BaTiO$_{3}$ film.