Dresden 2017 – wissenschaftliches Programm

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MA: Fachverband Magnetismus

MA 25: Ferroics - Domains, Domain Walls and Skyrmions I

MA 25.7: Vortrag

Dienstag, 21. März 2017, 11:30–11:45, WIL B321

Mechanically soft domain walls in hard ferroelectrics — •Neus Domingo, Kumara Cordero-Edwards, James Zapata, and Gustau Catalan — Catalan Institute of Nanoscience and Nanotechnology (ICN2), CSIC and The Barcelona Instituteof Science and Technology, Campus UAB, Bellaterra, 08193 Barcelona, Spain

All ferroic materials can display regions (domains) with different polarity of the order parameter. The boundaries between domains are known as domain walls. Domain walls may possess functional properties not existent in the host material, such as conductivity in the walls of insulators, ferromagnetism in the walls of antiferromagnets, or polarization in the walls of ferroelastics. This could potentially be used to make new electronic devices at an unprecedented small scale, where the ”active ingredient” are not the domains but the domain walls.

Among the many properties of domain walls, mechanical response appears to have been largely neglected, and there are very few, if any, studies specifically aimed at determining the local mechanical properties of domain walls.

In this presentation, we will show our first experimental measurements of the stiffness of domain walls in ferroelectric lithium niobate and related perovskite ferroelectrics, as measured by atomic force microscopy using a mechanical resonance spectroscopy mode. The key result is that even purely ferroelectric (non-ferroelastic) 180 degree domain walls in uniaxial ferroelectrics are considerably softer than the domains they separate.