Epitaxial Pb(Zr,Ti)O3 Thin Films on Flexible Substrates

It is well known that the piezoelectric properties of a thin film can be influenced by crystallographic texture. At the extreme case, epitaxial thin films can be deposited on single crystal substrates (with appropriate lattice matching) to effectively achieve a single crystal thin film. Here, the maximum advantage of orientation dependence is found. Typically this has required small, expensive single crystalline substrates. In the past 10 years, however, the technique of ion beam assisted deposition has been developed for applying a biaxially textured template to an arbitrary smooth surface. This has opened up a new realm of materials integration possibilities, with the prime example being high-temperature superconducting wires. Here, the same template is utilized for deposition of epitaxial Pb(Zr,Ti)O-3 thin films onto LaNiO3 and La0.7Sr0.3MnO3-coated flexible substrates. Chemical solution deposition (CSD) is used to produce PZT thin films with very high (00l) orientation and excellent in-plane orientation. Macroscopic ferroelectric measurements depict very square hysteresis behavior, with high remnant polarization of similar to 40 mu C/cm(2). Piezoresponse force microscopy and local hysteresis measurements were used to image the microscopic domain structure and to demonstrate the piezoelectric behavior in these materials.