Charge Carrier Relaxation Study in Glass-Added Barium Titanate Ceramics Using Thermally Stimulated Depolarization Current

Abstract

The depolarization process of glass-added barium titanate (BaTiO3) ceramics with two different glass concentrations was investigated using a thermally stimulated depolarization current (TSDC) technique. The TSDC spectra of the glass-added BaTiO3 ceramics show three peaks. The first sharp peak near the Curie temperature is due to pyroelectric current associated with ferroelectric-paraelectric phase transition. The middle temperature peak at about 200°C showed no dependence on the depolarization current peak position in the polarization field, and the activation energies of this peak were between 0.43 eV and 0.55 eV, which are attributed to the behavior of defect dipoles related to oxygen vacancies within the BaTiO3 grains. Moreover, the high temperature peak at around 300°C indicated that the depolarization current peak position depends on the polarization temperature and decreases with increasing polarization field. The activation energy of this high temperature peak was between 0.78 eV and 0.98 eV, which is similar to the activation energy for the motion of oxygen vacancies in perovskite oxides. The high temperature peak could be attributed to the migration of oxygen vacancies across grain boundaries. In this work we developed a model in which oxygen vacancies that originated from the defect within grains migrated from the anode to the cathode and some were trapped at the grain boundaries. It is presented here and successfully interprets the appearance and behavior of these peaks.