A thermodynamic phenomenology for ferroelectric tungsten bronze Sr0.6Ba0.4Nb2O6 (SBN:60)

Abstract

The tetragonal tungsten bronze ferroelectrics in the strontium barium niobate system have been extensively studied over many years. As for many of the bronzes, a crude interpretation of the experimental data has been attempted in the past using the simple Landau‐Ginsburg‐Devonshire expansion of the Gibbs free energy as a Taylor series in powers of the polarization, lumping all the temperature dependence into the lowest order term. In this paper new measurements are presented for the temperature dependence of dielectric polarization, permittivity, and the E‐field dependence of the permittivity. It is shown that for a realistic fitting of the data, the Taylor expansion must be taken to at least the eighth power term, and that the coefficients of terms up to the sixth power must be taken as functions of temperature. Since the phenomenology describes equilibrium behavior, it is the total static polarizability that is being explored in this treatment. The nature of this temperature dependence strongly suggests that the phase transition from a macropolar to a macrononpolar state is tetracritical.