Coexistence of ferroelectric phases in barium titanate single-domain thin films

Abstract

In about twenty years, the temperature-misfit strain phase diagrams have become valuable tools to describe ferroelectric thin film properties. The background theoretical approach consists in searching for the position of the global minimum of the potential landscape and deducing the thermodynamically stable phase. In temperature-misfit strain phase diagrams, lines separate the stable phase regions, and the analysis of the polarization continuity properties across these lines allows us to determine the order of phase transition. This work revealed additional important information relative to the properties of first order phase transitions; we determined the limit of stability of the metastable phases and plotted the corresponding lines in the traditional temperature-misfit strain diagrams. These one dimensional boundaries are the analog to the superheating and supercooling temperature points in the context of bulk ferroelectric crystal. We highlight two dimensional coexistence regions adjacent to first order thermodynamic transition lines. The location and the shape of these regions are strongly dependent on the set of parameters used to describe the bulk crystal. We illustrate the interest in the revelation of coexistence regions, showing that the corresponding multi-stability properties could be used to design non-binary memory cells by using barium titanate thin films.