Ferroelectrics subject to suitable electric boundary conditions present a steady negative capacitance response. When the ferroelectric is in a heterostructure, this behavior yields a voltage amplification in the other elements, which experience a potential difference larger than the one applied, holding promise for low-power electronics. So far research has focused on verifying this effect and little is known about how to optimize it. Here we describe an electrostatic theory of ferroelectric/dielectric superlattices, convenient model systems, and show the relationship between the negative permittivity of the ferroelectric layers and the voltage amplification in the dielectric ones. Then, we run simulations of PbTiO3/SrTiO3 superlattices to reveal the factors most strongly affecting the amplification. In particular, we find that giant effects (up to 10-fold increases) can be obtained when PbTiO3 is brought close to the so-called "incipient ferroelectric" state.
The consideration of size-induced ferroelectric-paraelectric phase transition for conventional and incipient ferroelectrics thin films with perovskite structure was carried out in phenomenological theory framework of Ginsburg-Landau-Devonshire. The more general form of surface free energy expansion that includes intrinsic surface stress tensor, surface piezoelectric effect and electrostriction as well as quadratic and quartic powers of surface polarization has been considered. The analytical expressions for thickness dependence of transition temperature was derived both for the conventional an…
Cubic structure is one of the most commonly found structures for oxides at high temperature. As the temperature is lowered only a handful of these oxides exhibit ferroelectricity which is rather surprising. In this paper, we use the example of YCrO3 (YCO), an incipient ferroelectric material to show that in most oxides there are two competing phenomenon -onset of ferroelectricity due to rotation of CrO6 octahedra and displacement of Y atom leading to suppression of ferroelectricity. This competition reveals that while the octahedral rotations favor a lower symmetry state, the Y atom displaceme…
A parameterized effective Hamiltonian approach is used to investigate KTaO$_3$. We find that the experimentally observed anomalous dielectric response of this incipient ferroelectric is well reproduced by this approach, once quantum effects are accounted for. Quantum fluctuations suppress the paraelectric--to--ferroelectric phase transition; it is unnecessary to introduce defects to explain the dielectric behavior. The resulting quantum-induced local structure exhibits off-center atomic displacements that display {\sl longitudinal, needle-like correlations} extending a few lattice constants.
The ferroelectric trends of rutile (TiO$_2$) in bulk and at the (110) surface are investigated by means of ab initio density functional theory. We discuss the underlying mechanism of the incipient ferroelectric behavior of rutile in terms of Born effective charges, which we decompose in individual contributions by means of maximally localized Wannier functions. We show that a ferroelectric phase can be stabilized for a variety of different lattice distortions which all enlarge the shortest Ti-O distance, even if the longer apical Ti-O bond is simultaneously shortened. At the (110) surface, the…
The dielectric constant of the incipient ferroelectric EuTiO$_3$ exhibits a sharp decrease at about 5.5K, at which temperature antiferromagnetic ordering of the Eu spins simultaneously appears, indicating coupling between the magnetism and dielectric properties. This may be attributed to the modification of the soft-phonon mode, $T_{1μ}$, which is the main contribution to the large dielectric constant, by the Eu spins(7$μ_B$ per Eu). By adding the coupling term between the magnetic and electrical subsystems as $ -g\sum\limits_l {\sum\limits_{< {i,j}} {q_l^2}} \overrightarrow {S_i} \cdot \overr…
High-mobility layered semiconductors have the potential to enable the next-generation electronics and computing. This paper demonstrates that the ultrahigh electron mobility observed in the layered semiconductor Bi$_2$O$_2$Se originates from an incipient ferroelectric transition that endows the material with a robust protection against mobility degradation by Coulomb scattering. Based on first-principles calculations of electron-phonon interaction and ionized impurity scattering, it is shown that the electron mobility of Bi$_2$O$_2$Se can reach 10$^4$ to 10$^6$ cm$^2$V$^{-1}$s$^{-1}$ over a wi…
We have used a first-principles-based scheme to compute the temperature-versus-misfit strain ``Pertsev'' phase diagram of ultrathin films of {\sl incipient} ferroelectric KTaO$_3$. Our results suggest that, at variance with the bulk material, KTaO$_3$ ultrathin films cannot be described as quantum paraelectrics. Rather, the behavior of the films is largely determined by surface/interface effects that favor ferroelectricity and the imperfect screening of the depolarizing fields. This leads to Pertsev phase diagrams that are qualitatively similar to those of {\sl normal} ferroelectrics such as B…
Based on our analytical results [http://arxiv.org/abs/1006.3670], we predict that undoped nanoparticles (size <10-100nm) of incipient ferroelectrics without any magnetic ions can become ferromagnetic even at room temperatures due to the inherent presence of a new type of magnetic defects with spin S=1, namely oxygen vacancies, where the magnetic triplet state is the ground state in the vicinity of the surface (magnetic shell), while the nonmagnetic singlet is the ground state in the bulk material (nonmagnetic core). Consideration of randomly distributed magnetic spins (S=1) had shown that magn…
Sr_(9-x)PbxCe2Ti12O36 system is derived from the perovskite SrTiO3 and its chemical formula can be written as (Sr_(1-y)Pby)0.75Ce0.167TiO3. We investigated dielectric response of Sr_(9-x)PbxCe2Ti12O36 ceramics (x = 0-9) between 100 Hz and 100 THz at temperatures from 10 to 700 K using low- and high-frequency dielectric, microwave (MW), THz and infrared spectroscopy. We revealed that Sr9Ce2Ti12O36 is an incipient ferroelectric with the R-3c trigonal structure whose relative permittivity e' increases from 167 at 300 K and saturates near 240 below 30 K. The subsequent substitution of Sr by Pb enh…
We report magnetization measurements and magnetic resonance data for SrTiO3 doped by manganese. We show that the recently reported coexistent spin and dipole glass (multiglass) behaviours are strongly affected by the distribution of Mn ions between the Sr and Ti sites. Motivated by this finding we calculate the magnetic interactions between Mn impurities of different kinds. Both LSDA+U and many-body perturbation theory evidence that magnetic and magnetoelectric interactions are mediated by Mn$_B^{4+}$ ions substituting for Ti. We propose two microscopic magnetoelectric coupling mechanisms, whi…
We revise the possibility of having an amplified surface potential in ferroelectric field-effect transistors pointed out by [S. Salahuddin and S. Datta, Nano Lett. 8, 405 (2008)]. We show that the negative-capacitance regime that allows for such an amplification is actually bounded by the appearance of multi-domain ferroelectricity. This imposes a severe limit to the maximum step-up of the surface potential obtainable in the device. We indicate new device design rules taking into account this scenario.
Ultrafast optical control of ferroelectricity using intense terahertz fields has attracted significant interest. Here we show that the nonlinear interactions between two optical phonons in SnTe, a two-dimensional in-plane ferroelectric material, enables a dynamical amplification of the electric polarization within subpicoseconds time domain. Our first principles time dependent simulations show that the infrared-active out-of-plane phonon mode, pumped to nonlinear regimes, spontaneously generates in-plane motions, leading to rectified oscillations in the in-plane electric polarization. We sugge…
Investigating the competition between ferroelectric ordering and quantum fluctuations is essential to tailor the desired functionalities of mixed ferroelectric and incipient ferroelectric systems, like, (Ba,Sr)TiO3 and (Eu,Ba)TiO3. Recently, it has been shown that suppression of quantum fluctuations increases ferroelectric ordering in (Eu,Ba)TiO3 and since these phenomena are coupled to crystallographic phase transitions it is essential to understand the role of phonons. Here, we observe that the unusual temperature dependence of phonons in BaTiO3 gets suppressed when Ba2+ is replaced by Eu2+.…
Using Landau-Ginzburg-Devonshire approach we calculated the equilibrium distributions of electric field, polarization and space charge in the ferroelectric-semiconductor heterostructures containing proper or incipient ferroelectric thin films. The role of the polarization gradient and intrinsic surface energy, interface dipoles and free charges on polarization dynamics are specifically explored. The intrinsic field effects, which originated at the ferroelectric-semiconductor interface, lead to the surface band bending and result into the formation of depletion space-charge layer near the semic…
We investigated the physical properties of low concentration ferroelectric nematic colloids, using calorimetry, optical methods, infra-red spectroscopy and capacitance studies. The resulting colloids normally remain homogeneous, but the nematic orientational coupling is significantly amplified. In particular cases, the nematic orientation coupling increases by 10% for particle concentrations of 0.2%. A manifestation of the increased orientational order is that the clearing temperature of a nematic colloid increases up to 40 Celsius degrees compared to the pure LC host. A theoretical model is p…
Dielectric response as a function of frequency for high-permittivity dielectric and ferroelectric materials is discussed emphasizing the dynamic behaviour in the microwave and infrared range. After introducing the usual modelling of the polar phonon response and anharmonic hopping in locally dynamically disordered solids, including discussion of displacive and order-disorder ferroelectric phase transitions, we summarised the experimental data for selected ferroelectric, incipient ferroelectric and antiferroelectric perovskite ceramics (STO, BTO, BST, PZO), discussing the dielectric grain size …
SrTiO3 is an incipient ferroelectric that is believed to exhibit a prototype displacive, soft mode ferroelectric transition when subjected to mechanical stress or alloying. We use high-angle annular dark-field imaging in scanning transmission electron microscopy to reveal local polar regions in the room-temperature, paraelectric phase of strained SrTiO3 films, which undergo a ferroelectric transition at low temperatures. These films contain nanometer-sized domains in which the Ti columns are displaced. In contrast, these nanodomains are absent in unstrained films, which do not become ferroelec…
The conductivity of the system magnetic dielectric (EuO) - graphene channel - ferroelectric substrate was considered. The magnetic dielectric locally transforms the band spectrum of graphene by inducing an energy gap in it and making it spin-asymmetric with respect to the free electrons. The range of spontaneous polarization (2- 5)mC/m2 that can be easily realized in thin films of proper and incipient ferroelectrics, was under examination. It was demonstrated, that if the Fermi level in the graphene channel belongs to energy intervals where the graphene band spectrum, modified by EuO, becomes …
