Effect of interfacial dislocations on ferroelectric phase stability and domain morphology in a thin film - a phase-field model

A phase-field model was developed for predicting the domain structure evolution in a thin film with an arbitrary distribution of dislocations and subject to a substrate constraint. The effect of interfacial dislocations on the formation of tetragonal ferroelectric domains in a cubic paraelectric matrix was studied. It was found that the presence of interfacial dislocations locally modifies the ferroelectric transition temperature and leads to the preferential formation of ferroelectric domains around misfit dislocations. The types of tetragonal variants depend on the directions of the dislocation lines and their Burgers vectors. (C) 2003 American Institute of Physics.