Pyroelectricity in doped phenacite structures | Department of Physics

Pyroelectricity in doped phenacite structures

Pyroelectricity is the measure of the temperature dependence of spontaneous electric polarization in ferroelectric materials. Current work is focussed on tailoring a typical complex oxide composition that can respond pyroelectricity in an exceptional manner. Phenacites are very interesting rhombohedral unit cell structures where inter-connected tetrahedrons make materials more compact and surfaces more open. These rhombohedral structures tailored suitably at low temperatures can exhibit very reasonably large electric polarization values extremely sensitive to thermal fluctuations of the order of few milli-kelvin.