Critical thickness of ultrathin ferroelectric BaTiO3 films

Abstract

To investigate the critical thickness of ferroelectric BaTiO3 (BTO) films, we fabricated fully strained SrRuO3∕BTO∕SrRuO3 heterostructures on SrTiO3 substrates by pulsed laser deposition with in situ reflection high-energy electron diffraction. We varied the BTO layer thickness from 3to30nm. By fabricating 10×10μm2 capacitors, we could observe polarization versus electric-field hysteresis loops, which demonstrate the existence of ferroelectricity in BTO layers thicker than 5nm. This observation provides an experimental upper bound of 5nm for the critical thickness. The BTO thickness-dependent scaling of the remanent polarization agrees with the predictions of recent first-principle simulations [J. Junquera and P. Ghosez, Nature 422, 506 (2003)].