Ferroelectrics Templated in Nanoporous Silicon Membranes.

A new method is proposed of fabrication of ferroelectric nanostructures using porous silicon as a template. It is shown that with the pore size of about 20 nm conventional sol-gel technique provides embedding of guest material only into the top layer of the host. Optical second harmonic generation is used as a probe to distinguish between paraelectric and ferroelectric phases of embedded nanoparticles. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]