Ferroelectric and antiferromagnetic properties of a ternary multiferroic BiFeO3-Pb(Fe1/2Nb1/2)O3-PbTiO3 single crystal.

A multiferroic crystal of 0.25BiFeO 3 -0.59Pb(Fe 1/2 Nb 1/2 )O 3 -0.16PbTiO 3 with dimension of 7×7×5 mm 3 was firstly grown by a top-seeded solution growth (TSSG) technique. The structure, dielectric, ferroelectirc and magnetic properties of the grown crystal were characterized. The crystal shows a pure tetragonal perovskite structure with space group of P4mm (99). The Curie temperature T C is close to 417 K with a low dielectric constant at room temperature ( ɛ RT ~422 at 1000 Hz). The hysteresis loop shows that the remanent polarization P r and the coercive field E C in [001]-oriented crystal are 26.3 μC/cm 2 and 8.6 kV/cm, respectively. The piezoelectric coefficient d 33 reaches 345 pC/N in [001]-oriented sample, much higher than the other BiFeO 3 -based crystals. The magnetic hysteretic loops at 2 K and temperature dependence of magnetization show the crystal material is weak antiferromagnetic with Neel Temperature T N ~125 K. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]