Decoration of solid state ferroelectric domains by the help of ferroelectric liquid crystals

In this paper we report the experimental data on the visualisation of the domain structure by FLCs in two different crystals: ammonium lithium sulphate (ALS) and deuterated triglycine sulphate (DTGS). In general, for ferroelectric solid crystals (FSC) two different geometries are available for the decoration: polar and nonpolar cuts, i.e. slices normal or parallel to the polar axis. In the experiments with FLC materials we used only polar cuts, i.e. FLC on the polar (010) plane of ALS and DTGS. The samples were prepared as sandwich structures FSC-FLC-electrode-glass substrate. The dynamic switching of the FSC domain-structure is discussed. The generation of a pyroelectric domain structure is also demonstrated.