Recent developments in ferroelectric nanostructures and multilayers

Excerpt

The property of ferroelectricity was first reported in 1921 in Rochelle salt (sodium potassium tartrate). Once considered a rare phenomenon limited to a comparatively small class of crystals, the discovery of ferroelectricity in the binary oxide compound barium titanate (BaTiO₃) in the mid-1940s paved the way for rapid advances in the search of new materials. Since that time, a great many other ferroelectric compounds and solid solutions have been found and there has been broad interest in ferroelectric materials that has continued essentially uninterrupted until the present time. Ferroelectric materials remain subjects of intensive investigation today for three principal reasons. First, the unique dielectric, pyroelectric, piezoelectric, and electro-optic properties exhibited by ferroelectric crystals, ceramics, composites, and thin films can be exploited in great many devices of commercial importance. Second, apart from their many technological applications, ferroelectric materials as a class exhibit a great diversity of phase transitions that make them ideal objects for scientific investigations into the origins and mechanisms of a wide range of structural transformation phenomena. Finally, advances in thin-film deposition and nanoscale fabrication techniques made over the past two decades have created new possibilities for the integration of these materials into the ever expanding array of microelectronic devices. …