Imaginary Time Schrödinger Treatment for Microstructure Modeling in Ferroelectrics

Abstract

Thermodynamic approach of ferroelectrics is reconsidered in recourse to thermal activated nature of polarization switching under arbitrary driving voltage. This analysis heavy relies on transformation of the problem to imaginary time Schrödinger equation and its integration by means adopted from pure quantum problems. It turns out that this nonadiabatic treatment reveals non-equilibrium properties directly relevant to reconstruction of local polarization from contact mode atomic force microscope measurements.

Keywords:

• Dynamic hysteresis
• spatial inhomogeneity
• symplectic integration
• nonequilibrium thermodynamics

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This work was partially supported by the Contract No ICA1-CT-2000-70007 of European Excellence Center of Advanced Material Research and Technology (Riga).