Vol.:(0123456789) 1 3 Journal of Materials Science: Materials in Electronics https://doi.org/10.1007/s10854-018-0088-8 Ferroelectric Sb-doped PMN-PT crystal: high electromechanical response with true-remanent polarization and resistive leakage analyses Abid Hussain 1  · Nidhi Sinha 2  · Abhilash J. Joseph 1  · Sahil Goel 1  · Binay Kumar 1 Received: 25 August 2018 / Accepted: 18 September 2018 © Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature 2018 Abstract In this work, pure and Sb-doped PMN-PT (64:36) crystals with pure perovskite phase have been successfully grown using high temperature solutions technique (or, fux technique), in the vicinity of MPB with the size of the crystals varying from 2 × 2 × 1 mm 3 to 7 × 5 × 4 mm 3 . Various properties like dielectric, piezoelectric, ferroelectric and pyroelectric were investi- gated for the Sb-doped PMN-PT crystals and have been compared to that of pure PMN-PT crystals. In the dielectric studies, the Curie temperature (T c ) for the pure and doped crystal was found to be 190 °C and 155 °C, respectively. Butterfy loops were traced from which a high value of the piezoelectric coefcient for Sb-doped crystal (d 33 * = 1972 pm/V) was revealed in the voltage range 250–500 V which was fairly greater than that observed for pure PMN-PT crystal (d 33 * = 1413 pm/V). The Sb-doped PMN-PT crystals displayed excellent saturated ferroelectric hysteresis loops with higher remanent polarization (P r ) value compared to the pure PMN-PT crystals. The doped crystals also displayed good fatigue resistant characteristic indicating the high ferroelectric quality of the crystals. The true or usable polarization (P tr ) component was extracted using the “True-remanent hysteresis” task. The value of P tr was found to be 41.53 µC/cm 2 suggesting lesser contributions (~ 7%) from non-remanent (non-switchable) components of polarization further confrming the good ferroelectric quality of the Sb-PMN-PT crystals. Also, the resistive-leakage characteristic of the doped crystal was analyzed using Time-dependent compensated hysteresis task. These results demonstrate that the Sb-doped PMN-PT crystal possesses excellent properties to achieve a variety of applications. 1 Introduction Ferroelectric crystals are very important for their variety of applications in high tech devices such as piezoelectric sen- sors and transducers, resonators, Fe-RAM, MEMS, electro- optical wave guides, IR cameras and detectors, and many more [1–9]. For a long time, lead zirconium titanate (desig- nated as PZT) ceramic had been the most widely used fer- roelectric material because of its excellent dielectric, piezo- electric and ferroelectric properties [10, 11]. But, the single crystals of PZT are very difcult to grow due to its high melting point and incongruently melting behavior [12]. Over the past two decades, relaxor ferroelectric namely lead mag- nesium niobate–lead titanate (Pb(Mg 1/3 Nb 2/3 )O 3 –PbTiO 3 designated as PMN-PT) has emerged as a highly promising material with large properties as compared to PZT [13, 14]. Compared with the bulk ceramics, its single crystals ofer enhanced properties, such as very high piezoelectric coef- fcient (> 1500 pC/N) and large electromechanical coupling factors k 33 (~ 90%) [15]. Like PZT, PMN-PT has the com- plex A(B I B II )O 3 type perovskite structure in which cation Pb 2+ lies at the ‘A’ site and the cations Mg 2+ , Nb 5+ and Ti 4+ lie on the ‘B’ site of the perovskite lattice. Further, like PZT, PMN-PT phase diagram shows a lack of stability in PMN- PT structure. For low PT concentration (< 27%), PMN-PT has a rhombohedral structure, on the other hand, it has a tetragonal structure for high PT concentration (> 34%). In between 27 and 34% of PT, PMN-PT exhibits an anomaly in the phase diagram which is known as the morphotropic phase boundary (MPB) [16, 17]. Giant electromechani- cal properties and abnormally high dielectric response of PMN-PT are observed in the vicinity of MPB region which * Binay Kumar b3kumar69@yahoo.co.in; bkumar@physics.du.ac.in 1 Crystal Lab, Department of Physics and Astrophysics, University of Delhi, Delhi 110007, India 2 Department of Electronics, SGTB Khalsa College, University of Delhi, Delhi 110007, India