Composite materials comprised of ferroelectric nanoparticles in a dielectric matrix are being actively investigated for a variety of functional properties attractive for a wide range of novel electronic and energy harvesting devices. However, the dependence of these functionalities on shapes, sizes, orientation and mutual arrangement of ferroelectric particles is currently not fully understood. In this study, we utilize a time-dependent Ginzburg-Landau approach combined with coupled-physics finite-element-method based simulations to elucidate the behavior of polarization in isolated spherical PbTiO or BaTiO nanoparticles embedded in a dielectric medium, including air. The equilibrium polarization topology is strongly affected by particle diameter, as well as the choice of inclusion and matrix materials, with monodomain, vortex-like and multidomain patterns emerging for various combinations of size and materials parameters. This leads to radically different polarization vs. electric field responses, resulting in highly tunable size-dependent dielectric properties that should be possible to observe experimentally. Our calculations show that there is a critical particle size below which ferroelectricity vanishes. For the PbTiO particle, this size is 2 and 3.4 nm, respectively, for high- and low-permittivity media. For the BaTiO particle, it is ∼3.6 nm regardless of the medium dielectric strength.
An understanding of the pyroelectric coefficient and particularly its relationship with the applied electric field is critical to predicting the device performance for infrared imaging, energy harvesting, and solid-state cooling devices. In this work, we compare direct measurements of the pyroelectric effect under pulsed heating to the indirect extraction of the pyroelectric coefficient from adiabatic hysteresis loops and predictions from Landau-Devonshire theory for PbZr0.52Ti0.48O3 (PZT 52/48) on platinized silicon substrates. The differences between these measurements are explained through a series of careful measurements that quantify the magnitude and direction of the secondary and field-induced pyroelectric effects. The indirect measurement is shown to be up to 25% of the direct measurement at high fields, while the direct measurements and theoretical predictions converge at high fields as the film approaches a mono-domain state. These measurements highlight the importance of directly measuring the pyroelectric response in thin films, where non-intrinsic effects can be a significant proportion of the total observed pyroelectricity. Material and operating conditions are also discussed which could simultaneously maximize all contributions to pyroelectricity.
We show that ferroelectric multilayers are not simple capacitors in series (CIS) and treating these as CIS may lead to misinterpretation of experimental results and to erroneous conclusions. Here, we present a theoretical model of ferroelectric bilayers using basic thermodynamics taking into account the appropriate electrical boundary conditions and electrostatic fields. The spontaneous polarization mismatch in ferroelectric/ferroelectric (FE/FE), FE/paraelectric (FE/PE), and FE/dielectric (FE/DE) bilayers results in a non-linear electrostatic coupling which produces significant deviations in the overall dielectric response if it is computed using the simple capacitor-inseries (CIS) model. Our results show that the CIS approach is a good approximation only for DE/DE multilayers and for FE heterostructures if the individual layers are electrostatically screened from each other.
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