Enhanced tunability in ferroelectric composites through local field enhancement and the effect of disorder

TL;DR

This paper numerically studies ferroelectric composites, revealing how local field enhancement and microstructure disorder influence their permittivity, tunability, and potential for improved microwave device applications.

Contribution

It introduces a refined model coupling electrostatics and permittivity, analyzing the impact of structure order and disorder on composite tunability.

Findings

Periodic structures enhance tunability significantly.

Disorder in microstructure weakens local permittivity effects.

Results guide the design of advanced composite ceramics for microwave devices.

Abstract

We investigate numerically the homogenized permittivities of composites made of low index dielectric inclusions in a ferroelectric matrix under a static electric field. A refined model is used to take into account the coupling between the electrostatic problem and the electric field dependent permittivity of the ferroelectric material, leading to a local field enhancement and permittivity change in the ferroelectric. Periodic and pseudo-random structures in two dimensions are investigated and we compute the effective permittivity, losses, electrically induced anisotropy and tunability of those metamaterials. We show that the tunability of such composites might be substantially enhanced in the periodic case, whereas introducing disorder in the microstructure weaken the effect of enhanced local permittivity change. Our results may be useful to guide the synthesis of novel composite ceramics with improved characteristics for controllable microwave devices.