Electron ptychography reveals a ferroelectricity dominated by anion displacements

Fuente: arXiv
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Autores principales: KP, Harikrishnan, Xu, Ruijuan, Patel, Kinnary, Crust, Kevin J., Khandelwal, Aarushi, Zhang, Chenyu, Prosandeev, Sergey, Zhou, Hua, Shao, Yu-Tsun, Bellaiche, Laurent, Hwang, Harold Y., Muller, David A.
Formato: Preprint
Publicado: 2024
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author KP, Harikrishnan
Xu, Ruijuan
Patel, Kinnary
Crust, Kevin J.
Khandelwal, Aarushi
Zhang, Chenyu
Prosandeev, Sergey
Zhou, Hua
Shao, Yu-Tsun
Bellaiche, Laurent
Hwang, Harold Y.
Muller, David A.
author_facet KP, Harikrishnan
Xu, Ruijuan
Patel, Kinnary
Crust, Kevin J.
Khandelwal, Aarushi
Zhang, Chenyu
Prosandeev, Sergey
Zhou, Hua
Shao, Yu-Tsun
Bellaiche, Laurent
Hwang, Harold Y.
Muller, David A.
contents Sodium niobate, a lead-free ferroic material, hosts delicately-balanced, competing order parameters, including ferroelectric states that can be stabilized by epitaxial strain. Here, we show that the resulting macroscopic ferroelectricity exhibits an unconventional microscopic structure using multislice electron ptychography. This technique overcomes multiple scattering artifacts limiting conventional electron microscopy, enabling both lateral spatial resolution beyond the diffraction limit and recovery of three-dimensional structural information. These imaging capabilities allow us to separate the ferroelectric interior of the sample from the relaxed surface structure and identify the soft phonon mode and related structural distortions with picometer precision. Unlike conventional ferroelectric perovskites, we find that the polar distortion in this material involves minimal distortions of the cation sublattices and is instead dominated by anion displacements relative to the niobium sublattice. We establish limits on film thickness for interfacial octahedral rotation engineering and directly visualize a random octahedral rotation pattern, arising from the flat dispersion of the associated phonon mode.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2408_14795
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Electron ptychography reveals a ferroelectricity dominated by anion displacements
KP, Harikrishnan
Xu, Ruijuan
Patel, Kinnary
Crust, Kevin J.
Khandelwal, Aarushi
Zhang, Chenyu
Prosandeev, Sergey
Zhou, Hua
Shao, Yu-Tsun
Bellaiche, Laurent
Hwang, Harold Y.
Muller, David A.
Materials Science
Mesoscale and Nanoscale Physics
Sodium niobate, a lead-free ferroic material, hosts delicately-balanced, competing order parameters, including ferroelectric states that can be stabilized by epitaxial strain. Here, we show that the resulting macroscopic ferroelectricity exhibits an unconventional microscopic structure using multislice electron ptychography. This technique overcomes multiple scattering artifacts limiting conventional electron microscopy, enabling both lateral spatial resolution beyond the diffraction limit and recovery of three-dimensional structural information. These imaging capabilities allow us to separate the ferroelectric interior of the sample from the relaxed surface structure and identify the soft phonon mode and related structural distortions with picometer precision. Unlike conventional ferroelectric perovskites, we find that the polar distortion in this material involves minimal distortions of the cation sublattices and is instead dominated by anion displacements relative to the niobium sublattice. We establish limits on film thickness for interfacial octahedral rotation engineering and directly visualize a random octahedral rotation pattern, arising from the flat dispersion of the associated phonon mode.
title Electron ptychography reveals a ferroelectricity dominated by anion displacements
topic Materials Science
Mesoscale and Nanoscale Physics
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2408.14795