Ultrafast Photovoltaic Response in Ferroelectric Nanolayers

Ultrafast Photovoltaic Response in Ferroelectric Nanolayers

We show that light drives large-amplitude structural changes in thin films of the prototypical ferroelectric PbTiO[subscript 3] via direct coupling to its intrinsic photovoltaic response. Using time-resolved x-ray scattering to visualize atomic displacements on femtosecond time scales, photoinduced...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Daranciang, Dan, Highland, Matthew J., Wen, Haidan, Young, Steve M., Brandt, Nathaniel Curran, Hwang, Harold Young, Vattilana, Michael, Nicoul, Matthieu, Quirin, Florian, Goodfellow, John, Qi, Tingting, Grinberg, Ilya, Fritz, David M., Cammarata, Marco, Zhu, Diling, Lemke, Henrik T., Walko, Donald A., Dufresne, Eric M., Li, Yuelin, Larsson, Jo¨rgen, Reis, David A., Sokolowski-Tinten, Klaus, Nelson, Keith Adam, Rappe, Andrew M., Fuoss, Paul H., Stephenson, G. Brian, Lindenberg, Aaron M.
Other Authors: Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Chemistry
Format: Article
Language:en_US
Published: American Physical Society 2012
Online Access:http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/71560
https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7804-5418
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Summary:We show that light drives large-amplitude structural changes in thin films of the prototypical ferroelectric PbTiO[subscript 3] via direct coupling to its intrinsic photovoltaic response. Using time-resolved x-ray scattering to visualize atomic displacements on femtosecond time scales, photoinduced changes in the unit-cell tetragonality are observed. These are driven by the motion of photogenerated free charges within the ferroelectric and can be simply explained by a model including both shift and screening currents, associated with the displacement of electrons first antiparallel to and then parallel to the ferroelectric polarization direction.

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