Combinatorial approach for ferroelectric material libraries prepared by liquid source misted chemical deposition method

Abstract

Combinatorial approach for discovering novel functional materials in the huge diversity of chemical composition and processing conditions has become more important for breakthrough in thin film electronic and energy-conversion devices. The efficiency of combinatorial method depends on the preparation of a reliable high-density composition thin-film library. The physico-chemical properties of each sample on the library should be similar to those of the corresponding samples prepared by one-by-one conventional methods. We successfully developed the combinatorial liquid source misted chemical deposition (LSMCD) method and demonstrated its validity in screening the chemical composition of Bi3.75LaxCe0.25-xTi3O12 (BLCT) for high remanent polarization (Pr). LSMCD is a cheap promising combinatorial screening tool. It can control the composition up to ppm level and produce homogeneous multicomponent library. LSMCD method allows us to prepare BLCT thin-film library at the variation of 0.4 mol% of La. Maximum 2Pr is 35 microC/cm-2 at x=0.21. The intensity of (117) XRD peak is quantitatively related to 2Pr. Newly developed scanning piezoelectric deformation measurement for nano-sized samples using scanning probe microscope (SPM) is also found out to be reliable for determining the relative ranking of Pr value rapidly.