DOI: 10.1063/1.1567795
WoS: 000182789700060
5 Citations
Résumé:

Superstructure formation is examined as a strain relaxation mechanism for polydomain structure in an "utlrathin" film on a cubic substrate. A phenomenological model of the dielectric and mechanical behavior of the ferroelectric PbTiO3 film on an MgO oxide substrate is proposed. The case of a laminar 90° domain structure with the walls tilted to 45° with respect to the film/substrate interface is considered. Taking account an inhomogeneous film–substrate coupling related to the superstructure formation and a dislocation propagation mechanism, we investigate strain relaxation and its effect on the domain structure, electrical and mechanical properties as a function of the film thickness, and temperature. It is shown that evolution of the aa-domain abundance in utlrathin film can be related to the film–substrate coupling mechanism expressed in terms of an external to the film inhomogeneous field. Its variation with the film thickness implies the existence of two distinct growth modes influencing the layer texture. For films with a thickness greater than 250 nm, aa-domains abundance is maximum and equal to 18%. For thinner films, c-domains become more stable and their proportion increases up to ~100% with the appearance of a single domain structure. Numerical modeling of electrical polarization, total strain in both domains, and mean stress in the film is performed for different thicknesses.