Abstract

The potential of ferroelectric materials as high density, low cost, electrical switch able two-stage memory devices have been widely recognised for decades,¹ Recently Guthner and his colleagues^2,3 used needle electrode and scanning force microscopy for poling and reading the polarization of ferroelectric domain in the region of about 1-µm. It seems, however, to be a serious restriction for practical ferroelectric memory that the metallic tip was in mechanical contact with the surface of ferroelectric sample while in writing and reading. The non-contact optical read-out, which has been tried by Wu et al.,⁴ was not successful due to the low density, high switching voltage and high bit cost. Herein, we present an optical probe⁵ and a metallic needle electrode, poling technique for locally detecting (reading) and poling (writing) ferroelectric domains, respectively, in 1/2 micrometer region of PZT thin film.

© 1993 Optical Society of America