Biography
My PhD work focuses on ferroelectric hafnium-based oxide thin film. In order to produce the perfect ferroelectric thin films, doping, growth condition, thermal treatment, substrate/electrode selection, etc. will be considered. The thin films will be grown using pulsed laser deposition in order to achieve epitaxial structure, allowing me to observe their intrinsic property due to nicely aligned crystallite structure. In terms of doping, co-doping will also be considered in order to investigate further the influence of average cation size and average charge. It is expected that co-doping could prevent the films to be leaky by maintaining concentration of charge carriers. The main dopants in consideration are zirconium, lanthanum and tantalum. In order to characterize the samples, a range of techniques including HRXRD, GIXRD, AFM, PFM and TEM will be used. For ferroelectricity measurement, Radiant FE tester, PFM and Gold Nano-Particle measurement will be used. Apart from doping, thickness, strain and oxygen vacancy engineering are also in consideration to achieve ferroelectricity in hafnium-based oxide thin films. My work is funded by EPSRC and Department of Materials Science and Metallurgy, University of Cambridge.
