ABSTRACT
Although surface and size eects were firstly reported in 1950s, it has recently motivated renewed interest because of the rapid progress in material fabrication techniques (Glass et al. 1977, Ishikawa et al. 1988). Theoretically, the Transverse Ising Model (TIM) is an eective method that studies the surface and size eects in ferroelectrics. Based on the TIM, Wang et al. (1992, 2000) and Sy (1993) investigated the surface parameters and the size dependence of the mean polarization of ferroelectrics. Teng and co-workers (2004, 2005, 2006) applied the Green’s function technique to a modified TIM to study the surface and size eects on the mean polarization of the ferroelectric thin film. Recently, Chen and co-workers (2008) put forward a “multi-step” model, i.e., the surface transition layer (STL) was introduced to the traditional model. They discussed the influence of the STL on the polarization and the critical temperature of the thin film, and thought that the STL is a vital factor that aects the phase transformation properties of the ferroelectric thin films. The purpose of this work is to investigation the susceptibility distribution of the thin film with the STL.
