Analogy between growth of crystals and ferroelectric domains. Application of Wulff construction

Abstract

In this article we applied a concept of kinetic Wulff plot (v-plot), which was proposed originally for understanding and control of the crystal growth, for characterization of the domain wall motion anisotropy in uniaxial ferroelectrics. Only the minima of v-plot can be obtained by the observation of the convex growth of isolated domains, whereas we can get insight of the v-plot maxima considering the concave growth during shape transformation after domain coalescence. Within this approach we reconstructed experimentally the compete v-plot for lithium niobate and potassium titanyl phosphate crystals. The giant effect of the domain wall velocity dependence on its orientation has been revealed. The effect results in fast restoration of the convex faceted domain shape with the slowest walls after merging. The proposed approach can be used for understanding and control of domain growth during electric field poling by patterned electrodes.