| The study of ferroelectric materials at small dimensions has been of increasing interest due to their numerous possible piezoelectric and ferroelectric applications such as memory devices, actively tunable photonic crystals, terahertz emitters, ultrasound transducers, energy harvesters, and micro/nano-electromechanical (MEMS/NEMS) sensors and actuators. Studies of ferroelectric size effects have been mostly limited due to difficulties in fabricating small scale piezoelectric materials with prescribed aspect ratios without damaging the surface layers of the ferroelectric via etching. Due to these fabrication difficulties, experimental verification of theoretical predictions of material characteristics for ferroelectrics at small scales is lacking. Therefore, this work focuses first on developing a manufacturing method of patterning ferroelectric materials at nanometer scale utilizing vacuum infiltration of PZT sol-gel solution into a soft-template, enabling the development of piezoelectric and ferroelectric NEMS/MEMS devices, and second to perform experimental studies to investigate the extrinsic contributions to the piezoelectric and ferroelectric response of nanoscale ferroelectrics. |
