Apparent Ferroelectric Polarization Hysteresis and a Simple Method to Observe Piezoelectric Strain Loops with a Microphone

TL;DR

The paper discusses how apparent ferroelectric hysteresis can be misleading and introduces a simple, inexpensive microphone-based method to reliably observe piezoelectric strain loops, improving ferroelectricity verification.

Contribution

A novel, cost-effective technique using a microphone to measure piezoelectric strain loops, providing a more reliable alternative to traditional methods.

Findings

Fake D-E loops can be caused by non-ferroelectric capacitance components.

S-E loops are more reliable than D-E loops for confirming ferroelectricity.

The microphone-based method successfully observed S-E loops in a commercial ceramic capacitor.

Abstract

Extra components in series to non-ferroelectric capacitance can cause apparent ferroelectric D-E hysteresis loops even with the double-wave method (DWM). Characteristics of fake loops are studied withsimple circuit models, and suspicious loops of actual materials are found in some papers using the DWM. Inverse piezoelectric strain also reverses along with the polarization by the electric field, and S-E loops are considered more reliable to prove ferroelectricity than the D-E loops. But measurement of S-E loops usually requires expensive instruments in contrast to D-E loops with a simple circuit. A very simple method is developed to observe S-E loops of bulk samples with an inexpensive small electret microphone and a little expansion to the circuit for D-E loops. S-E loops of a commercial ceramic capacitor by this method reveal that its D-E loops apparent.