Abstract
Ferroelectric domain walls are typically stationary because of the presence of a pinning potential. Nevertheless, thermally activated, irreversible creep motion can occur under a moderate electric field, thereby underlying rewritable and non-volatile memory applications. Conversely, as the temperature decreases, the occurrence of creep motion becomes less likely and eventually impossible under realistic electric-field magnitudes. Here we show that such frozen ferroelectric domain walls recover their mobility under the influence of quantum fluctuations. Nonlinear permittivity and polarization-retention measurements of an organic charge-transfer complex reveal that ferroelectric domain-wall creep occurs via an athermal process when the system is tuned close to a pressure-driven ferroelectric quantum critical point. Despite the heavy masses of material building blocks such as molecules, the estimated effective mass of the domain wall is comparable to the proton mass, indicating the realization of a ferroelectric domain wall with a quantum-particle nature near the quantum critical point.
Highlights
Ferroelectric domain walls are typically stationary because of the presence of a pinning potential
A combination of nonlinear permittivity and polarization-retention measurements reveals that the domain-wall creep motion manifests athermal, quantum-mechanical behaviour as a result of quantum fluctuations developing towards a ferroelectric quantum critical point (QCP)
The squareroot decreases in Tc and Ps are consistent with theoretical predictions that consider quantum fluctuation effects[18,19], indicating that the quantum fluctuations evolve towards the pressure-driven ferroelectric QCP and are, tunable
Summary
Ferroelectric domain walls are typically stationary because of the presence of a pinning potential. Nonlinear permittivity and polarization-retention measurements of an organic charge-transfer complex reveal that ferroelectric domain-wall creep occurs via an athermal process when the system is tuned close to a pressure-driven ferroelectric quantum critical point. From a phenomenological perspective, when a moderate external force is applied, the system begins to travel through this multidimensional potential landscape by successively overcoming the potential barriers separating distinct metastable states, resulting in creep motion in real space. This creep motion is induced by thermal activation, or thermal fluctuations. The estimated effective mass of the ferroelectric domain wall is found to be much lighter than the mass of the material building blocks, which are molecules in this case, and this situation is reminiscent of the electrically mobile bond solitons in conducting polymers, such as polyacetylene
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