DOE PAGES title logo U.S. Department of Energy
Office of Scientific and Technical Information

Title: Structural Evidence for Ultrafast Polarization Rotation in Ferroelectric/Dielectric Superlattice Nanodomains

Abstract

Weakly coupled ferroelectric/dielectric superlattice thin-film heterostructures exhibit complex nanoscale polarization configurations that arise from a balance of competing electrostatic, elastic, and domain-wall contributions to the free energy. A key feature of these configurations is that the polarization can locally have a significant component that is along the thin-film surface normal direction with an overall configuration maintaining zero net in-plane polarization. PbTiO 3 / SrTiO 3 thin-film superlattice heterostructures on a conducting SrRuO 3 bottom electrode on SrTiO 3 have a room-temperature stripe nanodomain pattern with a nanometer-scale lateral period. Ultrafast time-resolved x-ray free electron laser diffraction and scattering experiments reveal that above-bandgap optical pulses induce propagating acoustic pulses and a perturbation of the domain diffuse scattering intensity arising from the nanoscale stripe domain configuration. With 400-nm optical excitation, two separate acoustic pulses are observed: a high-amplitude pulse resulting from strong optical absorption in the bottom electrode and a weaker pulse arising from the depolarization-field-screening effect due to absorption directly within the superlattice. The picosecond scale variation of the nanodomain diffuse scattering intensity is consistent with a larger polarization change than would be expected due to the polarization-tetragonality coupling of uniformly polarized ferroelectrics. The polarization change is consistent, instead, with polarization rotation facilitated by the reorientation of the in-plane component of the polarization at the domain boundaries of the striped polarization structure. The complex steady-state configuration within these ferroelectric heterostructures leads to ultrafast polarization rotation phenomena that have previously been available only through the selection of bulk crystal composition.

Authors:
; ; ORCiD logo; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ORCiD logo; ; ; ORCiD logo; ; ; ORCiD logo; ORCiD logo; ORCiD logo
Publication Date:
Research Org.:
Argonne National Laboratory (ANL), Argonne, IL (United States). Advanced Photon Source (APS); Univ. of Wisconsin, Madison, WI (United States)
Sponsoring Org.:
USDOE Office of Science (SC), Basic Energy Sciences (BES)
OSTI Identifier:
1812421
Alternate Identifier(s):
OSTI ID: 1814749
Grant/Contract Number:  
FG02-04ER46147; AC02-06CH11357
Resource Type:
Published Article
Journal Name:
Physical Review. X
Additional Journal Information:
Journal Name: Physical Review. X Journal Volume: 11 Journal Issue: 3; Journal ID: ISSN 2160-3308
Publisher:
American Physical Society
Country of Publication:
United States
Language:
English
Subject:
75 CONDENSED MATTER PHYSICS, SUPERCONDUCTIVITY AND SUPERFLUIDITY; X-ray diffuse scattering; X-ray diffraction; photoexcitation; multilayer thin films; free-electron lasers; ferroelectrics; ultrafast optics; phonons; ferroelectricity; electric polarization

Citation Formats

Lee, Hyeon Jun, Ahn, Youngjun, Marks, Samuel D., Landahl, Eric C., Zhuang, Shihao, Yusuf, M. Humed, Dawber, Matthew, Lee, Jun Young, Kim, Tae Yeon, Unithrattil, Sanjith, Chun, Sae Hwan, Kim, Sunam, Eom, Intae, Park, Sang-Yeon, Kim, Kyung Sook, Lee, Sooheyong, Jo, Ji Young, Hu, Jiamian, and Evans, Paul G. Structural Evidence for Ultrafast Polarization Rotation in Ferroelectric/Dielectric Superlattice Nanodomains. United States: N. p., 2021. Web. doi:10.1103/PhysRevX.11.031031.
Lee, Hyeon Jun, Ahn, Youngjun, Marks, Samuel D., Landahl, Eric C., Zhuang, Shihao, Yusuf, M. Humed, Dawber, Matthew, Lee, Jun Young, Kim, Tae Yeon, Unithrattil, Sanjith, Chun, Sae Hwan, Kim, Sunam, Eom, Intae, Park, Sang-Yeon, Kim, Kyung Sook, Lee, Sooheyong, Jo, Ji Young, Hu, Jiamian, & Evans, Paul G. Structural Evidence for Ultrafast Polarization Rotation in Ferroelectric/Dielectric Superlattice Nanodomains. United States. https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevX.11.031031
Lee, Hyeon Jun, Ahn, Youngjun, Marks, Samuel D., Landahl, Eric C., Zhuang, Shihao, Yusuf, M. Humed, Dawber, Matthew, Lee, Jun Young, Kim, Tae Yeon, Unithrattil, Sanjith, Chun, Sae Hwan, Kim, Sunam, Eom, Intae, Park, Sang-Yeon, Kim, Kyung Sook, Lee, Sooheyong, Jo, Ji Young, Hu, Jiamian, and Evans, Paul G. Mon . "Structural Evidence for Ultrafast Polarization Rotation in Ferroelectric/Dielectric Superlattice Nanodomains". United States. https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevX.11.031031.
@article{osti_1812421,
title = {Structural Evidence for Ultrafast Polarization Rotation in Ferroelectric/Dielectric Superlattice Nanodomains},
author = {Lee, Hyeon Jun and Ahn, Youngjun and Marks, Samuel D. and Landahl, Eric C. and Zhuang, Shihao and Yusuf, M. Humed and Dawber, Matthew and Lee, Jun Young and Kim, Tae Yeon and Unithrattil, Sanjith and Chun, Sae Hwan and Kim, Sunam and Eom, Intae and Park, Sang-Yeon and Kim, Kyung Sook and Lee, Sooheyong and Jo, Ji Young and Hu, Jiamian and Evans, Paul G.},
abstractNote = {Weakly coupled ferroelectric/dielectric superlattice thin-film heterostructures exhibit complex nanoscale polarization configurations that arise from a balance of competing electrostatic, elastic, and domain-wall contributions to the free energy. A key feature of these configurations is that the polarization can locally have a significant component that is along the thin-film surface normal direction with an overall configuration maintaining zero net in-plane polarization. PbTiO3/SrTiO3 thin-film superlattice heterostructures on a conducting SrRuO3 bottom electrode on SrTiO3 have a room-temperature stripe nanodomain pattern with a nanometer-scale lateral period. Ultrafast time-resolved x-ray free electron laser diffraction and scattering experiments reveal that above-bandgap optical pulses induce propagating acoustic pulses and a perturbation of the domain diffuse scattering intensity arising from the nanoscale stripe domain configuration. With 400-nm optical excitation, two separate acoustic pulses are observed: a high-amplitude pulse resulting from strong optical absorption in the bottom electrode and a weaker pulse arising from the depolarization-field-screening effect due to absorption directly within the superlattice. The picosecond scale variation of the nanodomain diffuse scattering intensity is consistent with a larger polarization change than would be expected due to the polarization-tetragonality coupling of uniformly polarized ferroelectrics. The polarization change is consistent, instead, with polarization rotation facilitated by the reorientation of the in-plane component of the polarization at the domain boundaries of the striped polarization structure. The complex steady-state configuration within these ferroelectric heterostructures leads to ultrafast polarization rotation phenomena that have previously been available only through the selection of bulk crystal composition.},
doi = {10.1103/PhysRevX.11.031031},
journal = {Physical Review. X},
number = 3,
volume = 11,
place = {United States},
year = {Mon Aug 09 00:00:00 EDT 2021},
month = {Mon Aug 09 00:00:00 EDT 2021}
}

Works referenced in this record:

Ultrafast Photovoltaic Response in Ferroelectric Nanolayers
journal, February 2012


Development of an X-ray pixel detector with multi-port charge-coupled device for X-ray free-electron laser experiments
journal, March 2014

  • Kameshima, Takashi; Ono, Shun; Kudo, Togo
  • Review of Scientific Instruments, Vol. 85, Issue 3
  • DOI: 10.1063/1.4867668

Thermodynamic theory of PbTiO 3
journal, October 1987

  • Haun, M. J.; Furman, E.; Jang, S. J.
  • Journal of Applied Physics, Vol. 62, Issue 8
  • DOI: 10.1063/1.339293

Ultrafast lattice response of photoexcited thin films studied by X-ray diffraction
journal, November 2014

  • Schick, Daniel; Herzog, Marc; Bojahr, André
  • Structural Dynamics, Vol. 1, Issue 6
  • DOI: 10.1063/1.4901228

Polarization rotation mechanism for ultrahigh electromechanical response in single-crystal piezoelectrics
journal, January 2000

  • Fu, Huaxiang; Cohen, Ronald E.
  • Nature, Vol. 403, Issue 6767
  • DOI: 10.1038/35002022

Probing Impulsive Strain Propagation with X-Ray Pulses
journal, April 2001


Non-thermal fluence threshold for femtosecond pulsed x-ray radiation damage in perovskite complex oxide epitaxial heterostructures
journal, December 2019

  • Lee, Hyeon Jun; Ahn, Youngjun; Marks, Samuel D.
  • Applied Physics Letters, Vol. 115, Issue 25
  • DOI: 10.1063/1.5128509

Theory for displacive excitation of coherent phonons
journal, January 1992


Observation of room-temperature polar skyrmions
journal, April 2019


Electronic Origin of Ultrafast Photoinduced Strain in BiFeO 3
journal, January 2013


Tailoring the Properties of Artificially Layered Ferroelectric Superlattices
journal, December 2007

  • Dawber, M.; Stucki, N.; Lichtensteiger, C.
  • Advanced Materials, Vol. 19, Issue 23
  • DOI: 10.1002/adma.200700965

XCVI. Theory of barium titanate: Part I
journal, October 1949

  • Devonshire, A. F.
  • The London, Edinburgh, and Dublin Philosophical Magazine and Journal of Science, Vol. 40, Issue 309
  • DOI: 10.1080/14786444908561372

From flexoelectricity to absolute deformation potentials: The case of SrTiO 3
journal, November 2015


Ultrahigh strain and piezoelectric behavior in relaxor based ferroelectric single crystals
journal, August 1997

  • Park, Seung-Eek; Shrout, Thomas R.
  • Journal of Applied Physics, Vol. 82, Issue 4
  • DOI: 10.1063/1.365983

Hard X-ray free-electron laser with femtosecond-scale timing jitter
journal, October 2017


Elastic Constants of Strontium Titanate
journal, January 1963


Photoinduced Domain Pattern Transformation in Ferroelectric-Dielectric Superlattices
journal, July 2017


Thermoelastic study of nanolayered structures using time-resolved X-ray diffraction at high repetition rate
journal, January 2014

  • Navirian, H. A.; Schick, D.; Gaal, P.
  • Applied Physics Letters, Vol. 104, Issue 2
  • DOI: 10.1063/1.4861873

Thermal conductivity of perovskite ferroelectrics
journal, September 2008

  • Tachibana, Makoto; Kolodiazhnyi, Taras; Takayama-Muromachi, Eiji
  • Applied Physics Letters, Vol. 93, Issue 9
  • DOI: 10.1063/1.2978072

Emergent chirality in the electric polarization texture of titanate superlattices
journal, January 2018

  • Shafer, Padraic; García-Fernández, Pablo; Aguado-Puente, Pablo
  • Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Vol. 115, Issue 5
  • DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1711652115

Surface generation and detection of phonons by picosecond light pulses
journal, September 1986


A first-principles study of structural and elastic properties of bulk SrRuO 3
journal, December 2013

  • Masys, Š.; Jonauskas, V.
  • The Journal of Chemical Physics, Vol. 139, Issue 22
  • DOI: 10.1063/1.4840435

Optical Properties and Band Structure of SrTi O 3 and BaTi O 3
journal, October 1965


Negative capacitance in multidomain ferroelectric superlattices
journal, June 2016

  • Zubko, Pavlo; Wojdeł, Jacek C.; Hadjimichael, Marios
  • Nature, Vol. 534, Issue 7608
  • DOI: 10.1038/nature17659

Structural and energetic properties of domains in PbTiO 3 /SrTiO 3 superlattices from first principles
journal, May 2012


X-Ray Diffraction Studies of 180° Ferroelectric Domains in PbTiO 3 / SrTiO 3 Superlattices under an Applied Electric Field
journal, May 2010


Dynamical atomic charges: The case of AB O 3 compounds
journal, September 1998


Strong Visible-Light Absorption and Hot-Carrier Injection in TiO 2 /SrRuO 3 Heterostructures
journal, April 2013

  • Lee, Sungki; Apgar, Brent A.; Martin, Lane W.
  • Advanced Energy Materials, Vol. 3, Issue 8
  • DOI: 10.1002/aenm.201201116

Phase diagrams and physical properties of single-domain epitaxial Pb ( Zr 1 x Ti x ) O 3 thin films
journal, February 2003


Dynamics of the laser-induced ferroelectric excitation in BaTiO3 studied by x-ray diffraction
journal, January 2007

  • Istomin, Konstantin; Kotaidis, Vassilios; Plech, Anton
  • Applied Physics Letters, Vol. 90, Issue 2
  • DOI: 10.1063/1.2430773

Thermophysical properties of SrHfO3 and SrRuO3
journal, October 2004

  • Yamanaka, Shinsuke; Maekawa, Takuji; Muta, Hiroaki
  • Journal of Solid State Chemistry, Vol. 177, Issue 10
  • DOI: 10.1016/j.jssc.2004.05.039

Nanosecond Optically Induced Phase Transformation in Compressively Strained BiFeO 3 on LaAlO 3
journal, July 2019


Role of temperature-dependent electron trapping dynamics in the optically driven nanodomain transformation in a PbTiO 3 /SrTiO 3 superlattice
journal, January 2020

  • Park, Joonkyu; Ahn, Youngjun; Tilka, Jack A.
  • Applied Physics Letters, Vol. 116, Issue 1
  • DOI: 10.1063/1.5128364

Localized Excited Charge Carriers Generate Ultrafast Inhomogeneous Strain in the Multiferroic BiFeO 3
journal, March 2014


Correlations between tetragonality, polarization, and ionic displacement in PbTiO 3 -derived ferroelectric perovskite solid solutions
journal, October 2010


Following Strain-Induced Mosaicity Changes of Ferroelectric Thin Films by Ultrafast Reciprocal Space Mapping
journal, February 2013


Observation of Nanoscale 180 ° Stripe Domains in Ferroelectric P b T i O 3 Thin Films
journal, July 2002


Spatially resolved steady-state negative capacitance
journal, January 2019


Observation of polar vortices in oxide superlattices
journal, January 2016

  • Yadav, A. K.; Nelson, C. T.; Hsu, S. L.
  • Nature, Vol. 530, Issue 7589
  • DOI: 10.1038/nature16463

Caloric characteristics of PbTiO3 in the temperature range of the ferroelectric phase transition
journal, September 2012


Coherent Acoustic Phonon Oscillations in Semiconductor Multiple Quantum Wells with Piezoelectric Fields
journal, January 2000


Effects of doping on the lattice parameter of SrTiO 3
journal, June 2012

  • Janotti, Anderson; Jalan, Bharat; Stemmer, Susanne
  • Applied Physics Letters, Vol. 100, Issue 26
  • DOI: 10.1063/1.4730998

Soft-mode driven polarity reversal in ferroelectrics mapped by ultrafast x-ray diffraction
journal, March 2018

  • Hauf, Christoph; Hernandez Salvador, Antonio-Andres; Holtz, Marcel
  • Structural Dynamics, Vol. 5, Issue 2
  • DOI: 10.1063/1.5026494

Electric-Field-Driven Nanosecond Ferroelastic-Domain Switching Dynamics in Epitaxial Pb ( Zr , Ti ) O 3 Film
journal, November 2019


Nanoscale heat transport studied by high-resolution time-resolved x-ray diffraction
journal, September 2011


Electrostatic Coupling and Local Structural Distortions at Interfaces in Ferroelectric/Paraelectric Superlattices
journal, May 2012

  • Zubko, P.; Jecklin, N.; Torres-Pardo, A.
  • Nano Letters, Vol. 12, Issue 6
  • DOI: 10.1021/nl3003717

Thermodynamic theory of epitaxial ferroelectric thin films with dense domain structures
journal, November 2001


High-temperature heat capacity and thermal expansion of SrTiO 3 and SrZrO 3 perovskites
journal, February 1996


Phase-Transition Temperatures of Strained Single-Crystal SrRuO 3 Thin Films
journal, February 2010

  • Choi, Kyoung Jin; Baek, Seung Hyub; Jang, Ho Won
  • Advanced Materials, Vol. 22, Issue 6
  • DOI: 10.1002/adma.200902355

Coupled Ultrafast Lattice and Polarization Dynamics in Ferroelectric Nanolayers
journal, June 2007


Thermoelectric properties of reduced and La-doped single-crystalline SrTiO3
journal, April 2005


Phase-field simulation of domain structure for PbTiO3/SrTiO3 superlattices
journal, September 2009


Evolution of flux-closure domain arrays in oxide multilayers with misfit strain
journal, June 2019


Ultrafast Reversal of the Ferroelectric Polarization
journal, May 2017


Surface morphology determined by (001) single-crystal SrTiO3 termination
journal, November 2000


Ferroelectric Domains in PbTiO 3 /SrTiO 3 Superlattices
journal, January 2012


Unusual Behavior of the Ferroelectric Polarization in PbTiO 3 / SrTiO 3 Superlattices
journal, October 2005


Structural and Optical Properties of PbTiO3 Grown on SrTiO3 Substrates by Peroxide MBE
journal, January 2006


Nanosecond Dynamics of Ferroelectric/Dielectric Superlattices
journal, July 2011