Document Type
Article
Publication Date
9-2021
Keywords
Single-crystals; Ceramics; Behavior; Perovskite; Growth; State
Abstract
Phase transition describes a mutational behavior of matter states at a critical transition temperature or external field. Despite the phase-transition orders are well sorted by classic thermodynamic theory, ambiguous situations interposed between the first- and second-order transitions were exposed one after another. Here, we report discovery of phase-transition frustration near a tricritical composition point in ferroelectric Pb(Zr1-xTix)O3. Our multi-scale transmission electron microscopy characterization reveals a number of geometrically frustrated microstructure features such as self-assembled hierarchical domain structure, degeneracy of mesoscale domain tetragonality and decoupled polarization-strain relationship. Associated with deviation from the classic mean-field theory, dielectric critical exponent anomalies and temperature dependent birefringence data unveil that the frustrated transition order stems from intricate competition of short-range polar orders and their decoupling to long-range lattice deformation. With supports from effective Hamiltonian Monte Carlo simulations, our findings point out a potentially universal mechanism to comprehend the abnormal critical phenomena occurring in phase-transition materials.
Citation
Wei, X., Prokhorenko, S., Wang, B., Liu, Z., Xie, Y., Nahas, Y., Jia, C., Dunin-Borkowski, R. E., Mayer, J., Bellaiche, L., & Ye, Z. (2021). Ferroelectric Phase-transition Frustration Near a Tricritical Composition Point. Nature Communications, 12 (1), 5322. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-021-25543-1
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
