POLARIZATION SWITCHING — Microdiffraction images of polarization switching in a Pb(Zr,Ti)O3 thin film capacitor. Research on this and other ferroelectric materials could help lead to computer RAM and other memory devices that retain data even when turned off.

Microdiffraction images of polarization switching in a Pb(Zr,Ti)O3 thin film capacitor.

All of our current information technology relies on devices that process information as binary ones and zeroes. Ferroelectric materials are of special interest to developers of the next generation of such devices because they exhibit polarized electronic states that can represent bits of information. Moreover, these materials retain their polarization states without consuming electrical power, making ferroelectrics the subject of intense study for nonvolatile memory applications in which data is stored even when the power is turned off. One problem, however, is polarization fatigue: after a number of cycles, the switchable polarization begins to taper off, rendering the device unusable. Researchers from the University of Wisconsin, Bell Laboratories, and the University of Michigan used synchrotron radiation from the XOR 7-ID beamline at the APS to study the micrometer-scale details of polarization fatigue in ferroelectric oxides. See: D.-H. Do, P.G. Evans, E.D. Isaacs, D.M. Kim, C.B. Eom, and E.M. Dufresne, “Structural Visualization of Polarization Fatigue in Epitaxial Ferroelectric Oxide Devices,” Nat. Mater. 3, 365 (1 June 2004).

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