PAC investigation on the Zr-rich region of the PZT phase diagram

Abstract

Previous studies using perturbed angular correlation (PAC) spectroscopy in the PbZr 1− x Ti x O 3 (PZT) family of compounds show that whereas PbZrO 3 is characterized by a single probes site with a very well-defined hyperfine interaction, in PZT with x⩾0.1 the probes occupy two distributed sites. In this work, we investigate the Zr-rich region of the PZT phase diagram from x=0.02 up to x=0.08 using PAC in order to correlate the hyperfine parameters with the antiferroelectric–ferroelectric phase transition reported to occur at x=0.05. Two static electric quadrupole interactions, one of them fairly distributed, were detected over the whole Ti concentration range, and an abrupt change in the hyperfine parameters for 0.02< x<0.04 is observed. The behaviour of these parameters and the existence of two probe sites is discussed.