Enhancement of piezoelectric properties in a narrow cerium doping range of $\text{Ba}_{1-x}\text{Ca}_{x}\text{Ti}_{1-y}\text{Zr}_{y}\text{O}_{3}$ evidenced by high throughput experiment

TL;DR

This study uses high throughput experiments to explore how small amounts of cerium doping affect the dielectric and piezoelectric properties of BaCaTiZrO3, identifying optimal compositions for enhanced electromechanical performance.

Contribution

It demonstrates the effectiveness of high throughput methods in rapidly screening dopant effects on piezoelectric materials, specifically revealing cerium's impact on BCZT properties.

Findings

Cerium doping increases the piezoelectric coefficient up to an optimal level.

The variation in properties is influenced by domain wall dynamics and densities.

High throughput techniques efficiently identify promising compositions without extensive sample synthesis.

Abstract

Lead-free materials based on the $\text{(Ba,Ca)(Zr,Ti)O}_{3}$ (BCZT) system exhibit excellent electromechanical properties that can be strongly modified by small amounts of dopants. Here, we use a high throughput strategy to unravel the influence of aliovalent doping with Ce on dielectric and piezoelectric properties of BCTZ. We synthesize and characterize a single BCTZ thin film with a composition gradient from undoped to 0.2 mol % cerium doping. The cerium doping increases the piezoelectric coefficient from $42.3\pm 2.9 \text{pm V}^{-1}$ (undoped) to $63\pm 2.4 \text{pm V}^{-1}$ for 0.06 Ce-mol\%, and then decreases to $38.4 \pm 1.3 \text{pm V}^{-1}$ for the maximum amount of cerium (0.2 mol %). An investigation of sub-coercive field non-linearities reveal that these variations are not only induced by changes in dynamics and densities of domain walls. The results highlight the advantage of high throughput techniques to identify ideal compositions for applications, without synthesizing a high number of samples with unavoidable sample-to-sample variations.