Observation of ferroelectric nano-domains using scanning nonlinear dielectric imaging and piezoresponse imaging

Scanning nonlinear dielectric microscopy (SNDM) is a purely electrical method for observing the ferroelectric domain distributions. Today, its resolution is attained at the sub-nanometer. In this paper, we compare the resolution of SNDM to that of piezoresponse imaging by observing the ferroelectric domains in PZT thin film. Moreover, we observed the defects of polarization reversal with nanometer order using SNDM.