Freezing of the local dynamics in the relaxor ferroelectric PZN-4.5PT

TL;DR

This study investigates the temperature-dependent dynamics of diffuse scattering in the relaxor ferroelectric PZN-4.5PT, revealing a transition from quasielastic to static behavior as temperature decreases, with implications for understanding local atomic displacements.

Contribution

It provides detailed neutron scattering measurements showing the freezing of local atomic dynamics in PZN-4.5PT at low temperatures, highlighting wave vector-dependent behavior.

Findings

Diffuse scattering becomes static below 50 K.

Quasielastic component diminishes with cooling.

Different behaviors observed for <001> and <110> displacements.

Abstract

We report measurements of the neutron diffuse scattering in a single crystal of the relaxor ferroelectric material 95.5%Pb(Zn1/3Nb2/3)O3-4.5%PbTiO3 (PZN-4.5%PT). We show that the diffuse scattering at high temperatures has a quasielastic component with energy width $\agt$ 0.1 meV. On cooling the total diffuse scattering intensity increases, but the intensity and the energy width of the quasielastic component gradually diminish. At 50 K the diffuse scattering is completely static (i.e.the energy width lies within the limits of our instrumental resolution). This suggests that the dynamics of the short-range correlated atomic displacements associated with the diffuse scattering freeze at low temperature. We find that this depends on the wave vector q as the quasielastic diffuse scattering intensities associated with <001> (T1-type) and <110> (T2-type) atomic displacements vary differently with temperature and electric field.