| Abstract |
Nanotechnology is expected to have a big impact on most of our life. Nanostructred materials become more and more important in various fields such as nanoelectronics, information storage technology etc. At the nanometer scale, i.e. 1-100 nm, material properties are clearly size dependent and new properties are expected. Among functional materials nanoscale ferroelectrics can have a major role because they can be applied in different fields such as sensors, actuators, memory devices and optics. However they cannot be applied to nanometer scale devices before the influence of the lateral size on physical properties will be clarified.In order to find answer for the problems there is a need to have good quality nanoscale structures. It is a challenge to fabricate such structures in this range using both lithography (¿top¿down¿ approach) and self-assembling and self-patterning methods (¿bottom¿up¿ approach). Whereas conventional lithographic systems work usually with a resolution of about 100 nm the bottom-up approaches allow the inexpensive fabrication of structures with size of 10-20 nm. The main goal of the work is preparation of nanosized ferroelectric crystals by self-assembling methods. Successful strategies and routes have been developed to synthesize nanoscale materials of numerous simple systems such as semiconductors or metals. Complex systems such as ferroelectric oxides are not yet systematically addressed, despite of the possibility of discovering new materials with unique properties. Physical route based on the concept of microstructural instability of ultrathin films and chemical routes will be applied to obtain different perovskite crystals. A good quality of nanostructures that lateral dimension can be tuned in nanometer range is expected to fabricate and in future this will allow investigating structure-property relations (e.g. by transmission electron microscopy and piezoresponse force microscopy) and solve ¿size effects¿ problem.
|
|---|
