Microstructural size effects on the dielectric response of inhomogeneous media

The microstructure of dielectric films is an inherent characteristic of the fabrication process, and imposes distinctive behavior on the electric field distributions in these inhomogeneous media. In this paper, we examine the size dependent problem for cubic defects for an Al 2 O 3 dielectric material. Using the LOCALF method to analyze the electric field response, we have developed models for Al 2 O 3 dielectric films of varying microstructure size and volume fraction, and compare these results with conventional effective medium methods. Besides the dielectric susceptibility and volume fraction dependencies, the physical size of the heterogeneities creates localized regions of high field intensity.