No Arabic abstract
Following the recent discovery of a bulk photovoltaic effect in the Pb[(Mg1/3Nb2/3)0.68Ti0.32]O3 crystal, we report here more than one order of magnitude improvement of photovoltaicity as well as its poling dependence in the related composition of lead magnesium niobate-lead titanate noted Pb[(Mg1/3Nb2/3)0.7Ti0.30]O3. Photocurrent measurements versus light intensity reveal a fascinating hysteretic charge carriers dynamics clearly demonstrating charge generation, trapping and release processes.
Ferroelectric photovoltaic materials are an alternative to semiconductor-based photovoltaics and offer the advantage of above bandgap photovoltage generation. However, there are few known compounds, and photovoltaic efficiencies remain low. Here, we report the discovery of a photovoltaic effect in undoped lead magnesium niobate-lead titanate crystal and a significant improvement in the photovoltaic response under suitable electric fields and temperatures. The photovoltaic effect is maximum near the electric-field-driven ferroelectric dipole reorientation, and increases threefold near the Curie temperature. Moreover, at ferroelectric saturation, the photovoltaic response exhibits clear remanent and transient effects. The transient-remanent combinations together with electric and thermal tuning possibilities indicate photoferroelectric crystals as emerging elements for photovoltaics and optoelectronics, relevant to all-optical information storage and beyond.
Single crystals of Pb(In1/2Nb1/2)O3-Pb(Mg1/3Nb2/3)O3-PbTiO3 (PIN-PMN-PT) poled along [001] were investigated by dielectric, x-ray, and polarized light (PLM) and piezo-force microscopy (PFM) methods. PLM revealed {100} macro-domain plates that formed after poling, whose size increased on heating between room temperature and a rhombohedral rightarrow tetragonal phase transition, above which point a break-up of the macro-domain plates was observed. Corresponding PFM studies demonstrated that poling reduced the size of stripe-like domains that were internal to the macro-domain plates, whose size also increased on heating to TR-T. The temperature dependence of both the size of the macro-domain plates and internal sub-domains followed the Arrhenius relation with the activation energy of 0.4-0.5eV. The coercive field displays an abnormal increase on heating below TR-T, different than that for PMN-PT. The anomalously increased coercive field can be ascribed to the Arrhenius-type domain growth, indicating a simple thermally activated process and an important role of hierarchial domains in the improved performance of PIN-PMN-PT.
We report the complete set of elastic constants and the bulk modulus for single crystal Pb(Mg1/3Nb2/3)O3 (PMN) at room temperature obtained from Brillouin spectroscopy and molecular dynamics (MD) simulations. The bulk modulus from Brillouin is found to be 103 GPa, in a good agreement with earlier x-ray studies. We also derived the refractive index along all principal axes and found PMN to be optically isotropic, with a refractive index of 2.52 +/- 0.02. PMN shows mechanical anisotropy with A=1.7. The MD simulations of PMN using the random site model overestimate the elastic constants by 20-50 GPa and the bulk modulus is 148 GPa, but the mechanical anisotropy matches the Brillouin results of A = 1.7. We also determined the elastic constants for various models of PMN and we find variation in the elastic constants based on chemical ordering.
The temperature dependence of elastic, dielectric, and piezoelectric properties of (65-x)Pb(Mg1/3Nb2/3)O3-xBaTiO335-PbTiO3 ceramics with x=0, 1, 2, 3, and 4 was investigated. Compound with x=2 was found to exhibit a large piezoelectric response (d31=-170 pC/N, d33=530 pC/N at 300 K). Particularly, its d31 value was nearly a constant over a temperature range from 185 to 360 K. A broad ferroelectric phase transition tuned by BaTiO3 doping was deduced from the dielectric constant, elastic compliance constant and Raman spectra. The temperature-stable piezoelectric response was attributed to the counter-balance of contributions from the dielectric and elastic responses.
From the new infrared (IR) reflectivity and time-domain terahertz (THz) spectra combined with available high-frequency dielectric data above the MHz range in a broad temperature range of 10-900 K, a full picture of the soft and central mode behavior in the classical relaxor ferroelectric Pb(Mg1/3Nb2/3)O3 (PMN) is suggested. A detailed comparison is given with the recent hyper-Raman spectroscopy data (Phys. Rev. Lett. 117, 155501 (2016)), and also with other available experiments based on inelastic light and neutron scattering. The closest agreement is with the hyper-Raman data, both techniques yield the same number of soft-mode components and the same high-temperature softening towards the temperature T* ~ 400 K. In addition to evaluation of the IR-THz data using fitting with standard factorized form of the dielectric function, we performed a successful fitting of the same data using the effective medium approach (EMA), originally based on the assumption that the mesoscopic structure of PMN consists of randomly oriented uniaxially anisotropic polar nanodomains (PNDs) with somewhat harder TO polar modes in the direction along the local PND dipole (Phys. Rev. Lett. 96, 027601 (2006)). Evaluation using the Bruggeman EMA modelling has been successfully applied in the entire investigated temperature range. These results suggest that the response perpendicular to the local dipole moment, at high temperatures induced by random fields rather than PNDs, undergoes a classical softening from high temperatures with permittivity obeying the Curie-Weiss law, eps_per = C/(T-Tc), C = 1.7 x 10^5 K and Tc = 380 K. Below the Burns temperature ~620 K, a GHz relaxation ascribed to flipping of the PNDs emerges from the soft mode response, slows down and broadens, remaining quite strong towards the cryogenic temperatures, where it can be assigned to fluctuations of the PND boundaries.