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Matt Dawber's group in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at Stony Brook University is focused on the growth, characterization and understanding of ferroelectric materials and other oxides. Besides a general interest in ferroelectric materials the focus in this lab is on producing superlattice materials where interfacial coupling gives rise to either enhanced or totally new behaviour. Ferroelectric materials possess high degrees of functionality making them extremely useful in a broad variety of applications. Find out more on our research overview page.

Ferroelectric PbTiO₃/SrRuO₃ superlattices with broken inversion symmetry

S.J. Callori, J. Gabel, D. Su, J. Sinsheimer, M.V. Fernandez-Serra, M. Dawber

We have fabricated PbTiO₃/SrRuO₃ superlattices with ultra-thin SrRuO₃ layers which act as dielectric, rather than metallic, elements. The superlattices display both ferroelectricity and, as the volume fraction of PbTiO₃ is reduced, an increasingly important effect of polarization asymmetry due to compositional inversion symmetry breaking. The results are significant as they represent a new class of ferroelectric superlattices. By expanding our set of materials we are able to introduce new behaviors that can only occur when one of the materials is not a perovskite titanate. Here, compositional inversion symmetry breaking in bi-color superlattices, due to the combined variation of A and B site ions within the superlattice, is demonstrated using a combination of experimental measurements and first principles density functional theory.

A preprint of this paper is available on the arXiv at http://arxiv.org/abs/1201.2893

Research in our lab is supported by the National Science Foundation under:

• DMR1055413 CAREER: Engineered Ferroic Superlattices for Science, Technology and Education
• DMR1105202 Hybrid Graphene-Ferroelectric Devices
• DMR0959486 MRI-R2: Development of a System for Real-Time X-Ray Scattering Analysis of Complex Oxide Thin Film Growth.

Matthew Dawber
Assistant Professor
Dept of Physics and Astronomy
Stony Brook University
Stony Brook, NY 11794-3800 USA
+1 (631) 632 4978