Ferroelectric lithium niobate (LiNbO3) is widely used in integrated and guided-wave optics because of its favorable optical, piezoelectric, electro-optic, elastic, photoelastic, and photorefractive properties. However, detailed summaries of its pertinent physical properties and crystal structure are not readily available. In this tutorial paper, the important tensor physical properties and their mathematical descriptions are compiled and presented. The essential features of the structure of lithium niobate, including its hexagonal and rhombohedral unit cells, are illustrated and the principal (Cartesian) axes used in the description of the anisotropic properties are specified relative to the crystal structure. Errors in property coefficient values and structure information that have been propagated in the literature are corrected.

Lithium niobate: Summary of physical properties and crystal structure

Domains in ferroelectrics were considered to be well understood by the middle of the last century: They were generally rectilinear, and their walls were Ising-like. Their simplicity stood in stark contrast to the more complex Bloch walls or N\'eel walls in magnets. Only within the past decade and with the introduction of atomic-resolution studies via transmission electron microscopy, electron holography, and atomic force microscopy with polarization sensitivity has their real complexity been revealed. Additional phenomena appear in recent studies, especially of magnetoelectric materials, where functional properties inside domain walls are being directly measured. In this paper these studies are reviewed, focusing attention on ferroelectrics and multiferroics but making comparisons where possible with magnetic domains and domain walls. An important part of this review will concern device applications, with the spotlight on a new paradigm of ferroic devices where the domain walls, rather than the domains, are the active element. Here magnetic wall microelectronics is already in full swing, owing largely to the work of Cowburn and of Parkin and their colleagues. These devices exploit the high domain wall mobilities in magnets and their resulting high velocities, which can be supersonic, as shown by Kreines' and co-workers 30 years ago. By comparison, nanoelectronic devices employing ferroelectric domain walls often have slower domain wall speeds, but may exploit their smaller size as well as their different functional properties. These include domain wall conductivity (metallic or even superconducting in bulk insulating or semiconducting oxides) and the fact that domain walls can be ferromagnetic while the surrounding domains are not.

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Domain wall nanoelectronics

This article reviews acoustic microfiuidics: the use of acoustic fields, principally ultrasonics, for application in microfiuidics. Although acoustics is a classical field, its promising, and indeed perplexing, capabilities in powerfully manipulating both fluids and particles within those fluids on the microscale to nanoscale has revived interest in it. The bewildering state of the literature and ample jargon from decades of research is reorganized and presented in the context of models derived from first principles. This hopefully will make the area accessible for researchers with experience in materials science, fluid mechanics, or dynamics. The abundance of interesting phenomena arising from nonlinear interactions in ultrasound that easily appear at these small scales is considered, especially in surface acoustic wave devices that are simple to fabricate with planar lithography techniques common in microfluidics, along with the many applications in microfluidics and nanofluidics that appear through the literature.

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Microscale acoustofluidics: Microfluidics driven via acoustics and ultrasonics

The dielectric, piezoelectric and elastic properties of 0.91(PbZn1/3Nb2/3)O3–0.09PbTiO3 single crystals have been investigated as functions of temperature and applied electric field. Two multiple phase transitions at 68°C and 178°C, the crystal changing from the rhombohedral ferroelectric phase to tetragonal ferroelectric and then to cubic paraelectric, have been observed. Both the transitions are of first-order, but both are slightly diffused. Significant increases in the dielectric, piezoelectric and elastic constants are observed at the lower transition point. In particular, the sample poled along the pseudo-cubic [001] axis reveals anomalously large piezoelectric and electro-mechanical coupling constants at room temperature in the rhombohedral phase (d[001]//=1500×10-12 C/N, k[001]//=0.92).

https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1143/JJAP.21.1298/pdf

Dielectric and Piezoelectric Properties of 0.91Pb(Zn1/3Nb2/3)O3-0.09PbTiO3 Single Crystals

The determination of the elastic properties of composite materials (multiphase aggregates, polycrystals, and porous or cracked solids) from the elastic properties of the components may be approached in several ways. The problem may be treated statistically, via scattering theory, through variational principles, or by the assumption of specific geometries for the material under consideration. Each of these methods is reviewed in turn. The widely used Voigt-Reuss-Hill average can be a poor approximation for both two-phase composites and polycrystals, and its replacement by the two Hashin-Shtrikman bounds is recommended. For pore-containing or crack-containing media, specific geometry models must be considered if useful results are to be obtained. If aggregate theory is used to estimate the moduli of individual components of a composite whose bulk properties are known, the shear moduli of the component phases must be matched (within a factor of 2 or 3) for the method to be useful. Results for nonlinear composites (which allow calculation of the pressure variation of aggregate moduli) have been obtained for only a few special cases.

The Elastic Properties of Composite Materials

The elastic, piezoelectric, and dielectric constants, and their temperature dependence within the range 0°–110°C, have been determined for single crystals of lithium tantalate and lithium niobate. For each material, the constants were extracted from a combination of many ultrasonic phase‐velocity measurements, the measured resonant and antiresonant frequencies of a single length‐extensional bar resonator, and the measured low‐frequency capacitances of two thin flat‐plate specimens. For lithium tantalate, the normalized first temperature derivatives of the elastic constants range from −0.4 to −6.7×10−4/°C, while the derivatives for the piezoelectric stress constants range from −1.3 to +1.5×10−4/°C. In the case of lithium niobate, the elastic constant temperature derivatives are all on the order of −2×10−4/°C, while the piezoelectric temperature derivatives are all positive in the range 0.8–8.9×10−4/°C. The dielectric or permittivity temperature derivatives are positive for both materials.

F. S. Welsh

Papers

Temperature Dependence of the Elastic, Piezoelectric, and Dielectric Constants of Lithium Tantalate and Lithium Niobate