Ferroelectric thin films of BaxSr1−xTiO3 with compositional gradients normal to the growth surface have been formed by the successive deposition and annealing of films having step-variable Ba to Sr ratios. By suitably tailoring the magnitude and sense of the gradient in Ba to Sr ratio, directional potentials can be built into the structures yielding a new, but controllable, hysteresis phenomenon. Slater’s empirical model for ferroelectric materials has been extended to also describe thin films with polarization gradients normal to the growth surface, i.e., graded ferroelectric devices. This model accounts for several aspects of these structures, including: the broadness of the permittivity plots with temperature, the formation of a spontaneous potential upon oscillatory field excitation, offsets in the hysteresis graphs along the displacement axis with directions which are gradient dependent, and the electric field dependence of that offset.

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Effective pyroelectric coefficients as large as 5 μC/cm2 °C, with peak responsivities at approximately 50 °C, were obtained from compositionally graded barium strontium titanate ferroelectric thin film devices formed on silicon using unbalanced magnetron sputter deposition. These effective pyroelectric coefficients are nearly two orders of magnitude larger than those observed from conventional pyroelectric thin film ferroelectric detectors.