Growth and characterization of relaxor ferroelectric PMNT single crystals

Abstract

Abstract The results of relaxor ferroelectric PMNT single crystals grown by a modified Bridgman method with the size more than φ25×40 mm are reported in this paper. The crystal habit and growth mechanism of PMNT has been investigated to optimize the growth conditions. The reason that the PMNT crystals will grow along [111] direction under the condition of no seed crystals has been illustrated. It was found that the domain configuration in PMNT is much complicated and they will dominate the piezoelectric properties of PMNT single crystals. The characterization of PMNT single crystals shows that PMNT 67/33 single crystals have d33>2000pC/N. ϵ∼5500, k33-0.93. Keywords: relaxor ferroelectrics: PMNTcrystal growth: domain configurationcharacterization