Anisotropic Properties of Epitaxial Ferroelectric Lead-Free 0.5[Ba(Ti0.8Zr0.2)O3]-0.5(Ba0.7Ca0.3)TiO3 Films

Nicholas Cucciniello; Alessandro R Mazza; Pinku Roy; Sundar Kunwar; Di Zhang; Henry Y Feng; Katrina Arsky; Aiping Chen; Quanxi Jia

doi:10.3390/ma16206671

Anisotropic Properties of Epitaxial Ferroelectric Lead-Free 0.5[Ba(Ti_0.8Zr_0.2)O₃]-0.5(Ba_0.7Ca_0.3)TiO₃ Films

Materials (Basel). 2023 Oct 13;16(20):6671. doi: 10.3390/ma16206671.

Authors

Nicholas Cucciniello^{1

2}, Alessandro R Mazza², Pinku Roy², Sundar Kunwar², Di Zhang², Henry Y Feng¹, Katrina Arsky³, Aiping Chen², Quanxi Jia¹

Affiliations

¹ Department of Materials Design & Innovation, University at Buffalo, The State University of New York, Buffalo, NY 14260, USA.
² Center for Integrated Nanotechnologies (CINT), Los Alamos National Laboratory, Los Alamos, NM 87545, USA.
³ Department of Materials Science & Engineering, University of Illinois Urbana, Urbana, IL 61801, USA.

Abstract

As the energy demand is expected to double over the next 30 years, there has been a major initiative towards advancing the technology of both energy harvesting and storage for renewable energy. In this work, we explore a subset class of dielectrics for energy storage since ferroelectrics offer a unique combination of characteristics needed for energy storage devices. We investigate ferroelectric lead-free 0.5[Ba(Ti_0.8Zr_0.2)O₃]-0.5(Ba_0.7Ca_0.3)TiO₃ epitaxial thin films with different crystallographic orientations grown by pulsed laser deposition. We focus our attention on the influence of the crystallographic orientation on the microstructure, ferroelectric, and dielectric properties. Our results indicate an enhancement of the polarization and strong anisotropy in the dielectric response for the (001)-oriented film. The enhanced ferroelectric, energy storage, and dielectric properties of the (001)-oriented film is explained by the coexistence of orthorhombic-tetragonal phase, where the disordered local structure is in its free energy minimum.

Keywords: anisotropy; dielectric; energy storage; ferroelectric; morphotropic phase boundary.

Grants and funding

This research at the University at Buffalo (UB) was partially supported by the U.S. National Science Foundation (ECCS-1902623). N.C. and Q.J. acknowledge the CINT Users Program. The research at Los Alamos National Laboratory was supported by the NNSA’s Laboratory Directed Research and Development Program and was performed, in part, at the Center for Integrated Nanotechnologies (CINT), an Office of Science User Facility operated for the U.S. Department of Energy Office of Science. Los Alamos National Laboratory, an affirmative action equal opportunity employer, is managed by Triad National Security, LLC, for the U.S. Department of Energy’s NNSA, under contract 89233218CNA000001. N.C., A.C. and Q.J. acknowledge the support from DOE Office of Science Graduate Student Research Program (SCGSR). The SCGSR program is administered by the Oak Ridge Institute for Science and Education for the DOE under contract number DE-SC0014664. P.R. and A.C. acknowledge the support from LANL Seaborg Institute.