Direct Probing of Dielectric Property of BaTiO3 Nanoparticle on Conducting Substrate

With the development of technology, the performance of electronic devices is improving, increasing the number of components need to be used, so the size of the passive components, including multi-layer ceramic capacitors (MLCCs), should be downsized. Therefore, the size of BaTiO3, the raw dielectric material of MLCC, needs to be reduced. It is known that the dielectric properties of BaTiO3 nanoparticles are dependent on size and synthesis method. In previous studies, the dielectric properties of BaTiO3 nanoparticles were mainly studied using the slurry method, which is dielectric measurement of slurry consisted of solvent and nanoparticles. But this method has limitations in that the dielectric properties of the nanoparticles and solvent are measured together, so the information about the nanoparticles cannot be directly obtained. On the other hand, many researchers study dielectric properties in thin films or particles using scanning dielectric microscopy (SDM) measurement, which is an atomic force microscope (AFM)-based measurement method. In this study, the dielectric properties of BaTiO3 according to size and the synthesis method were measured using SDM to directly observe BaTiO3 nanoparticles. The capacitance gradient (dC/dz) was obtained using SDM measurement and the dielectric constant was studied. Through this study, we learned about the dielectric characteristics of BaTiO3 at the particle level, and it is expected that this will help select the appropriate type of dielectric powder in the development of next-generation MLCCs.