Effect of Seeding Layers on Hysteresis Loops and Phase Transition of the Ferroelectric Thin Film

Abstract

The hysteresis loops and the transition properties of a ferroelectric (FE) thin film with seeding layers are studied using the effective field theory with a probability distribution technique that accounts for the self-spin correlation functions. The effect of the interaction parameters for the seeding layer on the hysteresis loops and phase diagram are also examined. We calculated the critical temperature and the polarization of the FE thin film for different seeding layer structures. We find that the seeding layer can greatly increase the Curie temperature and the polarization of the whole FE thin film. The hysteresis loops are obtained for some typical value of the exchange interaction and the transverse field for a film with one or two seeding layers.

Keywords:

• Phase transition
• hysteresis loops
• seeding layer
• ferroelectrics thin film

Acknowledgments

This work has been initiated with the support of URAC: 08, the project RS:02 (CNRST) and the Swedish Research Links program dnr-348-2011-7264 and completed during a visit of A. A. at the Max Planck Institute für Physik Komplexer System Dresden, Germany. The authors would like to thank all the organizations.