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Thermal evolution of ferroelectric behavior in epitaxial Hf0.5Zr0.5O2
15 December 2020
Herein, we report a cryogenic-temperature study on the evolution of the ferroelectric properties of epitaxial Hf0.5Zr0.5O2 thin films on silicon. Wake-up, endurance, and fatigue of these films are found to be intricately correlated, strongly hysteretic, and dependent on available thermal energy.
Field-dependent measurements reveal a decrease in polarization with temperature, which has been determined not to be an intrinsic change of the material property, rather a demonstration of the increase in the coercive bias of the material. Our findings suggest that a deficiency in thermal energy suppresses the mobility of defects presumed to be oxygen vacancies during wake-up and trapped injected charge during fatigue, which is responsible for polarization evolution during cycling. This permits accelerated wake-up and fatigue effects at high temperatures where thermal energy is abundant but delays these effects at cryogenic temperatures.

The work at Argonne (J. W. Adkins and S. R. Bakaul were responsible for electronic transport experiments, data analysis, and contribution to manuscript writing) was supported by the U.S. Department of Energy, Office of Science, Basic Energy Sciences, Materials Sciences and Engineering Division. The use of the Center for Nanoscale Materials was supported by the U.S. Department of Energy, Office of Science, Office of Basic Energy Sciences, under Contract No. DE-AC02-06CH11357. J. T. Abiade acknowledges financial support from the U. S. National Science Foundation under Grant No. NSF-DMR-1508220. Financial support from the Spanish Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación, through the “Severo Ochoa” Programme for Centres of Excellence in R&D (No. SEV-2015-0496) and the Nos. MAT2017-85232-R (AEI/FEDER, EU), and MAT2015-73839-JIN projects, and from Generalitat de Catalunya (No. 2017 SGR 1377) is acknowledged. J. W. Adkins acknowledges the University of Illinois at Chicago's Pipeline to an Inclusive Faculty (PIF) Program. I. Fina acknowledges Ramón y Cajal Contract No. RYC-2017-22531.

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Oxides for new-generation electronics

Thermal evolution of ferroelectric behavior in epitaxial Hf0.5Zr0.5O2


J. W. Adkins, I. Fina, F. Sánchez, S. R. Bakaul, and J. T. Abiade

Appl. Phys. Lett. 117, 142902 (2020)
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1063/5.0015547