  T.W. Noh and his group (Kim et al.: PRL, 2005) have recently published a
seminal experimental study of very thin ferroelectric (FE) BaTiO3 capacitors.
They found an evidence that all their samples, including the thinnest one (d=5
nm), are multi-domain (MD). Under a high enough external field, the MD state
goes over into polarization saturated state, perhaps a single domain (SD) one,
which relaxes back due to domain wall motion if the external field E_0 is
reduced below a certain value E_0=E_{0r}. Kim et al. have approximately
identified this field as a depolarizing field due to incomplete screening by
electrodes and claimed that it coincides with the one estimated from
electrostatics. We found that such an interpretation does not apply and there
is actually a very instructive disagreement between the theory and experiment.
The data indicates (i) a presence of substantial Merz's activation field, (ii)
first direct observation of negative susceptibility of multidomain films that
we predicted some while ago.
