Phase transitions in typical fluorite-type ferroelectrics

While ferroelectric hafnia (HfO₂) has become a technically important material for microelectronics, the physical origin of its ferroelectricity remains poorly understood. The tetragonal P 4 2 / nmc phase is commonly assigned as its paraelectric mother phase but has no soft mode at the Brillouin zone center. In this work, we propose that the paraelectric—ferroelectric transition in the fluorite-type Pca2₁ ferroelectric family can be described by a Pcca — Pca 2 1 transition, where the Pcca mother phase will evolve into either the Pca 2 1 ferroelectric phase or the centrosymmetric P 2 1 / c monoclinic phase, depending on the strain conditions. The Pcca phase is directly linked to both phases in the context of continuous phase transition. Hafnia is regarded as a special case of this family in that it has accidental atomic degeneracy because all anions are oxygen. The theory is also correlated with the seven-coordination theory that explains the ferroelectricity in hafnia from a chemical perspective. In addition, the strain conditions to promote the ferroelectric phase in hafnia are discussed.