Roger Proksch1
Asylum Research1
Last year marked the 30th anniversary since piezoresponse force microscopy (PFM) was demonstrated on ferroelectric polymers by Güthner and Dransfield. Since then, it has emerged as the preeminent nanoscale approach to characterizing electromechanical response and is commonly used to map nanoscale polar structure. The recent trend of non-conventional, weaker materials has accelerated the PFM reporting of “strange ferroelectrics” – synonymous with materials that are mistakenly interpreted as ferroelectric due to measurement crosstalk and other artifacts. Interferometric AFM has proven to be a powerful tool for eliminating crosstalk and accurately quantifying nanoscale polar structures in a variety of emerging 2D and beyond Moore’s law materials. Building on those past successes, we have developed a new quadrature phase differential interferometer (QPDI) based detector. The QPDI detector allows crosstalk-free mapping of polarization structures with a detection noise floor of . This low noise translates to a >10x noise improvement in typical sub-resonant PFM measurements. We will discuss recent measurements using this detector, with a focus on textured polar materials.