Research on titanium-based ternary perovskites has developed at a truly relentless pace due to their wide variety of outstanding properties and limited availability of similar materials to meet the increasing technological demands of present and future applications. Despite years of intense research in this field, a clear understanding whether polar ordering still exists in low-dimensional perovskite structures is still lacking and several fundamental questions should be addressed before nanoscopic perovskites become feasible for applications. The nanoscale polarization structure and the scaling limit of the polar ordering were examined in aggregate-free BaTiO3 colloidal nanocrystals chosen as model system. A tetragonality of the unit cell and a primarily linear associated with a monodomain lattice polarization were found to persist down to 5 nm, the smallest accessible length scale. These findings can potentially result in the improvement of the actual design technologies in smart perovskite materials with programmable ferroelectric, dielectric and piezoelectric properties.

Polar ordering in nanoscale perovskites and its control via colloidal processing

245th National Meeting (2013)

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