Nonresonant dielectric hole-burning on a titanium-modified lead magnesium niobate ceramic

Abstract

Nonresonant dielectric hole-burning experiments were performed on the titanium-modified relaxor ferroelectric lead magnesium niobate around the diffuse maximum in the dielectric permittivity. After applying large alternating electric pump fields we monitored the polarization response to small field steps for times between 0.3 ms and 100 s. Depending on the frequency of the pump oscillation a speedup of the polarization response was observed with a maximum located around times corresponding to the inverse pump frequency. The refilling of the dielectric holes was investigated for several temperatures, pump frequencies, and pump field amplitudes. It proceeded always slower than the time scale set by the pump frequencies. Additionally, we observe a significant increase of the refilling times for increasing pump field amplitudes. This finding can be interpreted to indicate that increasingly large pump fields enable the domain walls to cross larger and larger pinning barriers. The subsequent recovery process, which leads back to the equilibrium domain size distribution, proceeds in the absence of an external electrical field. This rationalizes that recovery is slowed down significantly by application of large pump field amplitudes since then the pinning barriers that have to be traversed back are larger.