Nuclear-spin relaxation of ${}^{207}$Pb in ferroelectric powders

Abstract

Motivated by a recent proposal by O. P. Sushkov and co-workers to search for a P,T-violating Schiff moment of the ${}^{207}$Pb nucleus in a ferroelectric solid, we have carried out a high-field nuclear magnetic resonance study of the longitudinal and transverse spin relaxation of the lead nuclei from room temperature down to 10 K for powder samples of lead titanate (PT), lead zirconium titanate (PZT), and a PT monocrystal. For all powder samples and independently of temperature, transverse relaxation times were found to be $T_2\approx 1.5$ms, while the longitudinal relaxation times exhibited a temperature dependence, with $T_1$ of over an hour at the lowest temperatures, decreasing to $T_1\approx 7$s at room temperature. At high temperatures, the observed behavior is consistent with a two-phonon Raman process, while in the low temperature limit, the relaxation appears to be dominated by a single-phonon (direct) process involving magnetic impurities. This is the first study of temperature-dependent nuclear-spin relaxation in PT and PZT ferroelectrics at such low temperatures. We discuss the implications of the results for the Schiff-moment search.

6 pages, 4 figures

References in corpus (3)

• On the sensitivity of condensed-matter P- and T-violation experiments
• A suggested search for 207Pb nuclear Schiff moment in PbTiO3 ferroelectric
• Quantum chaos and fluctuations in isolated nuclear spin systems

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