Growth of the ternary Pb(Mn,Nb)O-3-Pb(Zr,Ti)O-3 thin film with high piezoelectric coefficient on Si by RF sputtering

In this study, ternary ferroelectric 0.06Pb(Mn1/3Nb2/3)O-3-0.94Pb(Zr0.48Ti0.52)O-3 (PMN-PZT) thin film with high piezoelectric coefficient were grown on La0.6Sr0.4CoO3-buffered Pt/Ti/SiO2/Si substrate by RF magnetron sputtering method. The phase and domain structure along with the macroscopic electrical properties were obtained. Under the optimized temperature of 550 degrees C and sputtering pressure 0.9 Pa, the PMN-PZT film owned large remnant ferroelectric polarization of 62 mu C/cm(2). In addition, the PMN-PZT film had polydomain structures with fingerprint-type nanosized domain patterns and typical local piezoelectric response. Through piezoelectric force microscopy, the PMN-PZT thin film at nanoscale exhibited obvious domain reversal when subjected to in situ poling field. It was further found that the quasi-static piezoelectric coefficient of the PMN-PZT thin film reached 267 pC/N, which was about twice to that of the commercial PbZrO3-PbTiO3 (PZT) thin film. The optimized relaxor ferroelectric thin film PMN-PZT on silicon with global electrical properties shows great potential in the piezoelectric micro-electro-mechanical systems applications.