No Arabic abstract
Systems that produce crackling noises such as Barkhausen pulses are statistically similar and can be compared with one another. In this project, the Barkhausen noise of three ferroelectric lead zirconate titanate (PZT) samples were demonstrated to be compatible with avalanche statistics. The peaks of the slew-rate (time derivative of current $dI/dt$) squared, defined as jerks, were statistically analysed and shown to obey power-laws. The critical exponents obtained for three PZT samples (B, F and S) were 1.73, 1.64 and 1.61, respectively, with a standard deviation of 0.04. This power-law behaviour is in excellent agreement with recent theoretical predictions of 1.65 in avalanche theory. If these critical exponents do resemble energy exponents, they were above the energy exponent 1.33 derived from mean-field theory. Based on the power-law distribution of the jerks, we demonstrate that domain switching display self-organised criticality and that Barkhausen jumps measured as electrical noise follows avalanche theory.
Previous studies of Barkhausen noise in PZT have been limited to the energy spectrum (slew rate response voltages versus time), showing agreement with avalanche models; in barium titanate other exponents have been measured acoustically, but only at ambient temperatures. In the present study we report the Omori exponent (-0.95$pm$0.03) for aftershocks in PZT and extend the barium titanate studies to a wider range of temperature.
We present an experimental study of the changes generated on the electrical resistance $R(T)$ of epitaxial Cr thin films by the transformation of quantized spin density wave domains as the temperature is changed. A characteristic resistance noise appears only within the same temperature region where a cooling-warming cycle in $R(T)$ displays hysteretic behavior. We propose an analysis based on an analogy with the Barkhausen noise seen in ferromagnets. There fluctuations in the magnetization $M(H)$ occur when the magnetic field $H$ is swept. By mapping $M rightarrow Psi_0$ and $H rightarrow T$, where $Psi_0$ corresponds to the order parameter of the spin density wave, we generalize the Preisach model in terms of a random distribution of {it resistive hysterons} to explain our results. These hysterons are related to distributions of quantized spin density wave domains with different sizes, local energies and number of nodes.
Using density-functional calculations we study the structure and polarization response of tetragonal PbTiO3, BaTiO3 and SrTiO3 in a strain regime that is previously overlooked. Different from common expectations, we find that the polarizations in all three substances saturate at large strains, demonstrating a universal phenomenon. The saturation is shown to originate from an unusual and strong electron-ion correlation that leads to cancellation between electronic and ionic polarizations. Our results shed new insight on the polarization properties, and reveal the existence of a fundamental limit to the strain-induced polarization enhancement.
Domains and domain walls are among the key factors that determine the performance of ferroelectric materials. In recent years, a unique type of domain walls, i.e., the sawtooth-shaped domain walls, has been observed in BiFeO$_{3}$ and PbTiO$_{3}$. Here, we build a minimal model to reveal the origin of these sawtooth-shaped domain walls. Incorporating this model into Monte-Carlo simulations shows that (i) the competition between the long-range Coulomb interaction (due to bound charges) and short-range interaction (due to opposite dipoles) is responsible for the formation of these peculiar domain walls and (ii) their relative strength is critical in determining the periodicity of these sawtooth-shaped domain walls. Necessary conditions to form such domain walls are also discussed.
Early work by the author with Prof. Ishibashi [Scott et al., J. Appl. Phys. 64, 787 (1988)] showed that switching kinetics in ferroelectrics satisfy a constraint on current transients compatible with d = 2.5 dimensionality. At that time with no direct observations of the domains, it was not possible to conclude whether this was a true Hausdorff dimension or a numerical artefact caused by an approximation in the theory (which ignored the dependence of domain wall velocity upon domain diameter). Recent data suggest that the switching dimensionality is truly fractal with d = 2.5. The critical exponent beta characterizing the order parameter P(T) can be written as a continuous function of dimension d as beta(d)= [ u(d)/2] [d+eta(d)-2], which is exact within hyperscaling; here u and eta are the exponents characterizing the pair correlation function G(r,T) and the structure factor S(q,T). For d=2.5 the estimate is that beta is approximately 1/4.