Nanoscale switching electrode

3 AFM nanodomain tailoring technology 10.3.1 Nanoscale switching electrode 

The classical experimental setup developed for fe polarization reversal implies a singledomain fe sample sandwiched between two electrodes [28], While conventional domain inversion techniques use equal sized electrodes covering the polar faces of fe templates, nanodomain inversion occurs under totally different conditions when the bottom electrode is a uniform plate and the upper one is a point contact. Two different kinds of the upper switching mobile nanoelectrodes may be considered afm tip (and/or array of tips) and electron drop formed using electron beam exposure. When a voltage stress is applied to the nanoelectrode, both the electric field intensity and its spatial distribution strongly differ in fe thin films (thin fe crystals) and bulk fe crystals. 

10 Ferroelectric Domain Breakdown Application to Nanodomain Technology 

Another factor that influences strongly the evolution of polarization reversal in fe bulk crystals is the limited minimization of the depolarization field by means of screening charges. In the case of the afm tip of R 50 nm the screening charge is limited both by the size of the tip and its non-ohmic contact with the sample surface. Such an effect is especially pronounced in the case of indirect electron beam exposure method described in this paper. The strong limitation of the screening phenomenon provides a necessary condition for the observed effect of fdb [13-15], 

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Fig. 8. Schematic of the procedure used for fabrication of nanoscale molecular-switch devices by imprint lithography [62]. (a) Deposition of a molecular film on Ti/Pt nanowires and their micron-scale connections to contact pads, (b) Blanket evaporation of a 7.5 nm Ti protective layer, (c) Imprinting of 10 nm Pt layers with a mold that was oriented perpendicular to the bottom electrodes and aligned to ensure that the top and bottom nanowires crossed, (d) Reactive ion etching with CF4 and O2 (4 1) to remove the blanket Ti protective layer.

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