Surface and size effects on phase diagrams of ferroelectric thin films

Abstract

Taking into account effects of the surface and depolarization field, we investigated the "misfit strain-temperature" phase diagrams of ferroelectric thin film by using the time-dependent Ginzburg-Landau theory. The simulation results show that the surface effect can shift the phase diagram to lower temperature. More importantly, effect of the depolarization field obviously shrinks the c -phase, and dominates the paraelectric and aa-phase in the phase diagram.