Jon-Paul Maria

Jon-Paul Maria is a Professor of Materials Science and Engineering at The Pennsylvania State University. Prior to joining Penn State, Jon-Paul was a faculty member at North Carolina State University where he spent 15 years serving in the Materials Science and Engineering department. Jon-Paul received his BS., MS, and Ph.D. degrees from Penn State in Ceramic Science. Jon-Paul’s research group pursues new materials discovery, property engineering, advances in synthesis science, and new integration strategies to merge diverse materials. Laboratory activities of interest include physical vapor deposition, ceramic synthesis by powder processing, structural characterization by diffraction, and microstructure measurement using scanning probe and scanning electron microscopy. The Maria Group members currently pursue research in the areas of ferroelectric thin films, high permittivity materials, novel semiconductor contacts, oxide epitaxy, infra-red plasmonic materials and entropy engineered/stabilized crystals. With assistance from many collaborators, The Maria group published over 250 manuscripts dealing with structure-property-processing relationships in electronic materials. In 2016 Jon-Paul co-founded Third Floor Materials, a startup company that endeavors to develop novel IR sensor materials and technologies.

Abstract Title: Ferroelectrics Everywhere

Abstract:

Ferroelectricity in wurtzite-based crystals was observed in 2019 and immediately introduced exciting opportunities to explore and discover new structure-property relationships in novel formulation spaces. These observations lead one to speculate that ferroelectricity might be found much more broadly, even “everywhere”, by introducing the appropriate disorder in a variety of hosts.

The presentation will begin with a brief history of ferroelectricity with specific attention to the last 10 years where this important property was discovered in new oxide and nitride crystals. The remaining content will focus on the structure-process-property relationships in the B-substituted AlN and Mg-substituted ZnO wurtzite systems. Materials can be prepared between 100 °C and 350 °C with very little difference in electrical properties. In the best cases, capacitors can be prepared down to 10 nm thickness while still exhibiting ferroelectric switching. Below 25 nm, however, leakage current becomes problematic during low frequency hysteresis measurements. Challenges to thickness scaling will be discussed. The presentation will also include examples where proximity effects in layered ZnO/Zn1-xMgxO, AlN/Al1-xBxN, and Zn1-xMgxO/AlN heterostructures can induce switching in pure ZnO and AlN layers, with opportunities for reducing net coercive voltage values.