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Investigation of twin-wall structure at the nanometre scale using atomic force microscopy

Nature Materials volume 3, pages 453–457 (2004)Cite this article

Abstract

The structure of twin walls and their interaction with defects has important implications for the behaviour of a variety of materials including ferroelectric, ferroelastic, co-elastic and superconducting crystals. Here, we present a method for investigating the structure of twin walls with nanometre-scale resolution. In this method, the surface topography measured using atomic force microscopy is compared with candidate displacement fields, and this allows for the determination of the twin-wall thickness and other structural features. Moreover, analysis of both complete area images and individual line-scan profiles provides essential information about local mechanisms of twin-wall broadening, which cannot be obtained by existing experimental methods. The method is demonstrated in the ferroelectric material PbTiO3, and it is shown that the accumulation of point defects is responsible for significant broadening of the twin walls. Such defects are of interest because they contribute to the twin-wall kinetics and hysteresis.

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Figure 1: Typical c/a/c domain pattern (three domains separated by two twin walls) and the corresponding displacement field.
Figure 2
Figure 3: The average error per point of the simulation in Fig. 2b calculated using equation (3).
Figure 4: Histograms of the distribution of twin-wall half thickness (w) values that were fitted to individual scan profiles.
Figure 5

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Acknowledgements

We gratefully acknowledge the financial support of the Army Research Office (DAAD-19-99-1-0319) through a Department of Defense Multidisciplinary University Research Initiative. We thank W. G. Knauss for his generous help with the AFM.

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  1. Division of Engineering and Applied Science, California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, 91125, California, USA

    Doron Shilo, Guruswami Ravichandran & Kaushik Bhattacharya

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Correspondence to Doron Shilo.

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Shilo, D., Ravichandran, G. & Bhattacharya, K. Investigation of twin-wall structure at the nanometre scale using atomic force microscopy. Nature Mater 3, 453–457 (2004). https://doi.org/10.1038/nmat1151

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