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Fujii et al. Microstructures 2023;3:2023045 Microstructures
DOI: 10.20517/microstructures.2023.43

Research Article Open Access

Temperature dependence of dielectric nonlinearity

of BaTiO ceramics
3

1,2
Ichiro Fujii , Susan Trolier-McKinstry 2
1
Graduate Faculty of Interdisciplinary Research, University of Yamanashi, Kofu, Yamanashi 400-8510, Japan.
2
Department of Materials Science and Engineering and Materials Research Institute, The Pennsylvania State University,
University Park, PA 16802, USA.
Correspondence to: Prof. Ichiro Fujii, Graduate Faculty of Interdisciplinary Research, University of Yamanashi, Kofu, Yamanashi
400-8510, Japan. E-mail: ifujii@yamanashi.ac.jp

How to cite this article: Fujii I, Trolier-McKinstry S. Temperature dependence of dielectric nonlinearity of BaTiO ceramics.
3
Microstructures 2023;3:2023045. https://dx.doi.org/10.20517/microstructures.2023.43
Received: 21 Aug 2023 First Decision: 21 Sep 2023 Revised: 7 Oct 2023 Accepted: 19 Oct 2023 Published: 14 Nov 2023

Academic Editors: Dawei Wang, Fei Li Copy Editor: Fangyuan Liu Production Editor: Fangyuan Liu

Abstract
In many commercially utilized ferroelectric materials, the motion of domain walls is an important contributor to the
functional dielectric and piezoelectric responses. This paper compares the temperature dependence of domain wall
motion for BaTiO ceramics with different grain sizes, point defect concentrations, and formulations. The grain
3
boundaries act as significant pinning points for domain wall motion such that fine-grained materials show smaller
extrinsic contributions to the properties below the Curie temperature and lower residual ferroelectric contributions
immediately above the Curie temperature. Oxygen vacancy point defects make a modest change in the extrinsic
contributions of undoped BaTiO ceramics. In formulated BaTiO , extrinsic contributions to the dielectric response
3 3
were suppressed over a wide temperature range. It is believed this is due to a combination of reduced grain size,
the existence of a core-shell microstructure, and a reduction in domain wall continuity over the grain boundaries.

Keywords: Ferroelectrics, dielectric nonlinearity, grain size, ceramics

INTRODUCTION
It is well documented that the dielectric and piezoelectric responses of many ferroelectric materials include
contributions from the motion of domain walls, even when the electric field used to excite the material is
well below the coercive field . This motion of domain walls is important to understand, as it will govern
[1-6]
much of the field, time, and frequency dependence of the properties of a ferroelectric material. As an

© The Author(s) 2023. Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0
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