Infrared Signatures for Phase Identification in Hafnium Oxide Thin Films.

Phase identification in HfO-based thin films is a prerequisite to understanding the mechanisms stabilizing the ferroelectric phase in these materials, which hold great promise in next-generation nonvolatile memory and computing technology. While grazing-incidence X-ray diffraction is commonly employed for this purpose, it has difficulty unambiguously differentiating between the ferroelectric phase and other metastable phases that may exist due to similarities in the -spacings, their low intensities, and the overlapping of reflections. Infrared signatures provide an alternative route.