Ferroelectric Materials: Synthesis & Characterization

Ferroelectric materials receive great attention from the scientific international community because of the interesting phenomena they exhibit and their multiple applications such as transducers, capacitors, pyroelectric sensors, sonars, random access memories, etc. The demand for ferroelectric materials for technological applications enforced the in-depth research, in addition to the improvement of processing and characterization techniques. A ferroelectric material is a material that exhibits, over some range of temperature, a spontaneous electric polarisation that can be reversed or reoriented by application of an electric field. Recently, there has been an enormous increase in research activity in the field of ferroelectrics and ferromagnetics especially in multiferroic materials which possess both ferroelectric and ferromagnetic properties simultaneously. However, the ferroelectric, ferromagnetic, and multiferroic properties should be further improved from the utilitarian and commercial viewpoints. Ferroelectric materials offer a wide range of useful properties. These include ferroelectric hysteresis (used in nonvolatile memories), high permittivities (used in capacitors), high piezoelectric effects (used in sensors, actuators and resonant wave devices such as radio-frequency filters), high pyroelectric coefficients (used in infra-red detectors), strong electro-optic effects (used in optical switches) and anomalous temperature coefficients of resistivity (used in electric-motor overload-protection circuits). In addition, ferroelectrics can be made in a wide variety of forms, including ceramics, single crystals, polymers and thin films – increasing their exploitability. Ferroelectric Materials - Synthesis and Characterization covers material aspects, physical effects, characterization and modeling, and applications. The aim of this book is to provide a conversant review of recent scientific findings and recent advances in the field of ferroelectric materials, allowing a deep understanding of the material aspects of ferroelectricity.