Giant tuning of ferroelectricity in single crystals by thickness engineering

Zibin Chen; Fei Li; Qianwei Huang; Fei Liu; Feifei Wang; Simon P Ringer; Haosu Luo; Shujun Zhang; Long-Qing Chen; Xiaozhou Liao

doi:10.1126/sciadv.abc7156

Giant tuning of ferroelectricity in single crystals by thickness engineering

Sci Adv. 2020 Oct 14;6(42):eabc7156. doi: 10.1126/sciadv.abc7156. Print 2020 Oct.

Authors

Zibin Chen¹, Fei Li², Qianwei Huang³, Fei Liu⁴, Feifei Wang⁴, Simon P Ringer³, Haosu Luo⁵, Shujun Zhang⁶, Long-Qing Chen⁷, Xiaozhou Liao¹

Affiliations

¹ School of Aerospace, Mechanical and Mechatronic Engineering, The University of Sydney, Sydney, NSW 2006, Australia. z.chen@sydney.edu.au shujun@uow.edu.au xiaozhou.liao@sydney.edu.au.
² Electronic Materials Research Laboratory, Key Laboratory of the Ministry of Education, Xi'an Jiaotong University, Xi'an 710049, China.
³ School of Aerospace, Mechanical and Mechatronic Engineering, The University of Sydney, Sydney, NSW 2006, Australia.
⁴ Key Laboratory of Optoelectronic Material and Device, Department of Physics, Shanghai Normal University, Shanghai 200234, China.
⁵ Key Laboratory of Inorganic Functional Materials and Devices, Shanghai Institute of Ceramics, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Shanghai 201899, China.
⁶ Institute for Superconducting and Electronic Materials, Australian Institute of Innovative Materials, University of Wollongong, Wollongong, NSW 2522, Australia. z.chen@sydney.edu.au shujun@uow.edu.au xiaozhou.liao@sydney.edu.au.
⁷ Materials Research Institute, Department of Materials Science and Engineering, The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA 16802, USA.

Abstract

Thickness effect and mechanical tuning behavior such as strain engineering in thin-film ferroelectrics have been extensively studied and widely used to tailor the ferroelectric properties. However, this is never the case in freestanding single crystals, and conclusions from thin films cannot be duplicated because of the differences in the nature and boundary conditions of the thin-film and freestanding single-crystal ferroelectrics. Here, using in situ biasing transmission electron microscopy, we studied the thickness-dependent domain switching behavior and predicted the trend of ferroelectricity in nanoscale materials induced by surface strain. We discovered that sample thickness plays a critical role in tailoring the domain switching behavior and ferroelectric properties of single-crystal ferroelectrics, arising from the huge surface strain and the resulting surface reconstruction. Our results provide important insights in tuning polarization/domain of single-crystal ferroelectric via sample thickness engineering.

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