Float-Zone Growth and Properties of Ferroelectric Lead Titanate

Lead titanate (PbTiO3) is a ferroelectric/piezoelectric material widely used in medical ultrasound transducers and infrared detectors. It is also important as an end member of morphotropic solid-solution systems such as Pb(Zn1/3Nb2/3)–PbTiO3 (PZN–PT) and Pb(Mg1/3Nb2/3)–PT (PMN–PT) that exhibit exceptional electromechanical properties as oriented single crystals. The float-zone technique has been used to grow pure crystals of lead titanate. To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first time that the growth of this compound by the float-zone technique has been reported. The principal advantage of the float-zone technique is that no container is required so that a uniform distribution of chemical constituents can be obtained while eliminating problems of heterogeneous nucleation and metal contamination at the container wall. Although large single crystals were not obtained in the current study primarily due to instabilities of the molten liquid zone, the combined results of characterization by electron probe microanalysis, x-ray diffraction, specific heat, and dielectric permittivity measurements show that the float-zone crystal growth technique can produce lead titanate crystals of high chemical and phase purity. However, the results show that to obtain large single crystals, the stability of the molten zone at low cooling rates must be improved.