Flexoelectricity in antiferroelectric ceramics
arXiv:1806.02653 · doi:10.1063/1.5044724
Abstract
Flexoelectricity (coupling between polarization and strain gradients) is a property of all dielectric materials that has been theoretically known for decades, but it is only relatively recently that it has begun to attract experimental attention. As a consequence, there are still entire families of materials whose flexoelectric performance is unknown. This is the case, for example, of antiferroelectrics: materials with an antipolar but switchable arrangement of dipoles. And yet, these materials could be flexoelectrically relevant because it has been hypothesised that the origin of their antiferroelectricity might be flexoelectric. In this work, we have measured the flexoelectricity of two different antiferroelectrics (PbZrO3 and AgNbO3) as a function of temperature, up to and beyond their Curie temperature. Neither flexoelectricity nor the flexocoupling coefficients are anomalously high, but the flexocoupling shows a sharp peak at the antiferroelectric phase transition.
12 pages, 3 figures
References in corpus (4)
- Strain gradient induced polarization in SrTiO3 single crystals
- Breaking of macroscopic centric symmetry in paraelectric phases of ferroelectric materials and implications for flexoelectricity
- Interfacial Polarization and Pyroelectricity in Antiferrodistortive Structures Induced by a Flexoelectric Effect and Rotostriction
- First-principles study of the multi-mode anti-ferroelectric transition of PbZrO3