Improved energy storage properties through multilayer stacking of relaxor ferroelectric and antiferroelectric thin films

Abstract Multilayers of relaxor ferroelectric (Pb 0.92 La 0.08 Zr 0.52 Ti 0.48O3 ) and antiferroelectric (Pb 0.96 La 0.04 Zr 0.98 T i0.02O3 ) thin films were fabricated on Pt/Ti/SiO 2 /Si substrates by Chemical Solution Deposition (CSD) method. The properties of the independent relaxor ferroelectric (RFE denoted as R) and antiferroelectric (AFE denoted as A) thin films were compared with their various stack configurations made by alternatively coating the R and A layers in the patterns of R/A, R/A/R, R/A/R/A/R/A, A/R, A/R/A, and A/R/A/R/A/R. The crystallographic studies confirmed the coexistence of both RFE and AFE phases in the multilayer stacks which was further verified by electrical characterizations. The multilayer stack showed improved power density (PD), energy efficiency ( η ), and reduced dielectric loss compared to individual R and A films. Among all the multilayer configurations, the stack with A/R/A/R/A/R layer exhibited significant improvement in energy efficiency (94%) which is higher than the reported results so far on multilayer structures.