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Updated: Jun 5, 2026

Measuring Magnetically-Tuned Ferroelectric Polarization in Liquid Crystals
Published on: August 15, 2018
Can an electric field induce an antiferroelectric phase out of a ferroelectric phase?
X Tan1, J Frederick, C Ma
1Department of Materials Science and Engineering, Iowa State University, Ames, Iowa 50011, USA. xtan@iastate.edu
Abstract:
It has been widely accepted that electric fields favor the ferroelectric phase with parallel electric dipoles over the antiferroelectric phase. With detailed measurements in polycrystalline ceramics of Pb(0.99)Nb(0.02[(Zr(0.57)Sn(0.43)(1-y)Ti(y)](0.98)O(3), we demonstrate in this Letter that electric fields can induce an antiferroelectric phase out of a ferroelectric phase, i.e., trigger an apparently unlikely ferroelectric-to-antiferroelectric phase transition. We suggest that it is caused by the volume contraction from the converse piezoelectric effect at the coercive field with a reversed polarity.
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