Observation of artificial nano-domains in ferroelectric thin films using nonlinear dielectric imaging and piezo imaging

Abstract

We have developed scanning nonlinear dielectric microscopy (SNDM) that is the first successful purely electrical method for observing polarization distributions of ferroelectric materials. Now the resolution of SNDM has been improved to sub-nanometer. On the other hand, the piezoelectric response imaging (piezo-imaging) using scanning force microscopy (SFM) is well known as the method for observing the polarization distributions. In this study, we compare the resolution of SNDM with that of the piezo-imaging and confirm that the resolution of SNDM is much higher than that of piezo-imaging. Then, as the fundamental study to apply the SNDM system to a ferroelectric reading-recording system, we switched and observed the ferroelectric domains using the SNDM system.