Publication Date:
2015-09-19
Description:
The enhancement of the functional properties of materials at reduced dimensions is crucial for continuous advancements in nanoelectronic applications. Here, we report that the scale reduction leads to the emergence of an important functional property, ferroelectricity, challenging the long-standing notion that ferroelectricity is inevitably suppressed at the scale of a few nanometers. A combination of theoretical calculations, electrical measurements, and structural analyses provides evidence of room-temperature ferroelectricity in strain-free epitaxial nanometer-thick films of otherwise nonferroelectric strontium titanate (SrTiO3). We show that electrically induced alignment of naturally existing polar nanoregions is responsible for the appearance of a stable net ferroelectric polarization in these films. This finding can be useful for the development of low-dimensional material systems with enhanced functional properties relevant to emerging nanoelectronic devices.〈br /〉〈span class="detail_caption"〉Notes: 〈/span〉Lee, D -- Lu, H -- Gu, Y -- Choi, S-Y -- Li, S-D -- Ryu, S -- Paudel, T R -- Song, K -- Mikheev, E -- Lee, S -- Stemmer, S -- Tenne, D A -- Oh, S H -- Tsymbal, E Y -- Wu, X -- Chen, L-Q -- Gruverman, A -- Eom, C B -- New York, N.Y. -- Science. 2015 Sep 18;349(6254):1314-7. doi: 10.1126/science.aaa6442.〈br /〉〈span class="detail_caption"〉Author address: 〈/span〉Department of Materials Science and Engineering, University of Wisconsin-Madison, Madison, WI 53706, USA. ; Department of Physics and Astronomy and Nebraska Center for Materials and Nanoscience, University of Nebraska, Lincoln, NE 68588, USA. ; Department of Materials Science and Engineering, Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA 16802 USA. ; Department of Materials Modeling and Characterization, Korea Institute of Materials Science, Changwon 642-831, Korea. ; Department of Physics, Temple University, Philadelphia, PA 19122, USA. ; Department of Materials Science and Engineering, Pohang University of Science and Technology, Pohang 790-784, Korea. ; Materials Department, University of California-Santa Barbara, Santa Barbara, CA 93106-5050, USA. ; Department of Physics, Boise State University, Boise, ID 83725-1570, USA. ; Department of Physics and Astronomy and Nebraska Center for Materials and Nanoscience, University of Nebraska, Lincoln, NE 68588, USA. agruverman2@unl.edu eom@engr.wisc.edu. ; Department of Materials Science and Engineering, University of Wisconsin-Madison, Madison, WI 53706, USA. agruverman2@unl.edu eom@engr.wisc.edu.〈br /〉〈span class="detail_caption"〉Record origin:〈/span〉 〈a href="http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/26383947" target="_blank"〉PubMed〈/a〉
Print ISSN:
0036-8075
Electronic ISSN:
1095-9203
Topics:
Biology
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Chemistry and Pharmacology
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Computer Science
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Medicine
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Natural Sciences in General
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Physics
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