Athermal domain-wall creep near a ferroelectric quantum critical point

Fumitaka Kagawa (), Nao Minami, Sachio Horiuchi and Yoshinori Tokura
Additional contact information
Fumitaka Kagawa: RIKEN Center for Emergent Matter Science (CEMS)
Nao Minami: The University of Tokyo
Sachio Horiuchi: National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology (AIST)
Yoshinori Tokura: RIKEN Center for Emergent Matter Science (CEMS)

Nature Communications, 2016, vol. 7, issue 1, 1-6

Abstract: Abstract Ferroelectric domain walls are typically stationary because of the presence of a pinning potential. Nevertheless, thermally activated, irreversible creep motion can occur under a moderate electric field, thereby underlying rewritable and non-volatile memory applications. Conversely, as the temperature decreases, the occurrence of creep motion becomes less likely and eventually impossible under realistic electric-field magnitudes. Here we show that such frozen ferroelectric domain walls recover their mobility under the influence of quantum fluctuations. Nonlinear permittivity and polarization-retention measurements of an organic charge-transfer complex reveal that ferroelectric domain-wall creep occurs via an athermal process when the system is tuned close to a pressure-driven ferroelectric quantum critical point. Despite the heavy masses of material building blocks such as molecules, the estimated effective mass of the domain wall is comparable to the proton mass, indicating the realization of a ferroelectric domain wall with a quantum-particle nature near the quantum critical point.

Date: 2016
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms10675 Abstract (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:nat:natcom:v:7:y:2016:i:1:d:10.1038_ncomms10675

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://www.nature.com/ncomms/

DOI: 10.1038/ncomms10675

Access Statistics for this article

Nature Communications is currently edited by Nathalie Le Bot, Enda Bergin and Fiona Gillespie

More articles in Nature Communications from Nature
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().