Project funded through the CEA (France) - IFA (Romania) agreement
October 2012 - September 2014
Partners :
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The fundamental property of ferroelectric (FE) materials is their electrically switchable spontaneous polarization below the Curie temperature. However, the direction of the polarization in FE thin films is not only the result of an external electrical potential difference since it usually results from the minimization of the electrostatic energy in the whole sample. The polarization charge at the surface can be screened through a variety of mechanisms including extrinsic screening by adsorbate species, intrinsic screening by defects or free charge carriers in for example adjacent electrodes, surface and near surface structural changes (rumpling, relaxation and reconstruction) and by domain ordering which reduces the energy of the system by screening the depolarizing field through ordering of the FE domains with anti-parallel polarization.
It has been suggested that oxygen vacancies stabilize negative polarization, i.e. polarization pointing inwards. The topology of the surface FE order is therefore a complex interaction of the chemical and electronic environment.
In this project, photoelectron spectroscopy with energy, wave-vector and spatial resolution will be used to study the electronic and chemical structure of the FE topology and the mechanisms responsible for chemically induced switching. Surface composition by high resolution XPS and band structure determination by ARUPS will be compared with theory. Structural determination will include electron diffraction (LEED, RHEED) and X-ray photoelectron diffraction (XPD), while the surface morphology, FE topology and chemistry will be assessed by scanning probe microscopy (SPM) techniques and by low energy electron microscopy (LEEM) and photoelectron emission microscopy (real and reciprocal space PEEM). The project will advance understanding of the electronic, structural, and compositional origins of chemical switching of polarization. It will explore the chemical potential-temperature phase diagrams through the use of atomic oxygen and vicinal surfaces. Finally, it will furnish an understanding of the switching chemistry vital to a wide range of applications such as ferroelectric enhanced catalysis and photolysis, chemical sensing, screening mechanisms in oxide based electronics.
Globally large efforts are dedicated to improve the sensitivity of NMR mainly via two complementary approaches:
However these developments entail the appearance of new phenomena related to the non-linear evolution of nuclear magnetization in liquid samples (See for instance for a review in this field).
In most cases they result from the intricate combination of:
These effects are actually met in a wide range of other physical systems (such as Bose-Einstein condensates, superfluid 3He, or quantum entangled spin systems).
Triangle de la Physique - Theme 7, nanophotonics (equipment / operating costs)
January 2012 - December 2014
Partners :
Project funded through the CEA (France) - IFA (Romania) agreement
October 2012 - September 2014
Partners :
Completed ANR projects:
NANOCRISNET : A multifunctional platform for long range ordered nanocrystal networks fabrication
ANR-12-BSV5-0003, coordination and contact Patrick Berthault - LSDRM.
This ambitious project aims at proposing the combined use of hyperpolarized 129Xe NMR, micro-fluidics and micro-coils as an ultra sensitive biosensing tool for diagnosis purposes.
The final objective of this project is to integrate all developments and discoveries in an NMR lab-on-chip type system of general applicability for various in vitro biological diagnoses on commercial NMR spectrometers.