TY  - JOUR
AU  - Wei, Xian-Kui
AU  - Prokhorenko, Sergei
AU  - Wang, Bingqing
AU  - Liu, Zenghui
AU  - Xie, Yu-Juan
AU  - Nahas, Yousra
AU  - Jia, Chun-Lin
AU  - Dunin-Borkowski, Rafal E.
AU  - Mayer, Joachim
AU  - Bellaiche, Laurent
AU  - Ye, Zuo-Guang
TI  - Ferroelectric phase-transition frustration near a tricritical composition point
JO  - Nature Communications
VL  - 12
IS  - 1
SN  - 2041-1723
CY  - [London]
PB  - Nature Publishing Group UK
M1  - FZJ-2021-04985
SP  - 5322
PY  - 2021
AB  - Phase transition describes a mutational behavior of matter states at a critical transition temperature or external field. Despite the phase-transition orders are well sorted by classic thermodynamic theory, ambiguous situations interposed between the first- and second-order transitions were exposed one after another. Here, we report discovery of phase-transition frustration near a tricritical composition point in ferroelectric Pb(Zr1-xTix)O3. Our multi-scale transmission electron microscopy characterization reveals a number of geometrically frustrated microstructure features such as self-assembled hierarchical domain structure, degeneracy of mesoscale domain tetragonality and decoupled polarization-strain relationship. Associated with deviation from the classic mean-field theory, dielectric critical exponent anomalies and temperature dependent birefringence data unveil that the frustrated transition order stems from intricate competition of short-range polar orders and their decoupling to long-range lattice deformation. With supports from effective Hamiltonian Monte Carlo simulations, our findings point out a potentially universal mechanism to comprehend the abnormal critical phenomena occurring in phase-transition materials.
LB  - PUB:(DE-HGF)16
C6  - 34493734
UR  - <Go to ISI:>//WOS:000694655700017
DO  - DOI:10.1038/s41467-021-25543-1
UR  - https://juser.fz-juelich.de/record/903289
ER  -