Electric-field-induced non-ergodic relaxor to ferroelectric transition in BiFeO-SrTiO ceramics.

While BiFeO-based solid solutions show great promise for applications in energy conversion and storage, realizing this promise necessitates understanding the structure-property relationship in particular pertaining to the relaxor-like characteristics often exhibited by solid solutions with polar-to-non-polar morphotropic phase boundaries. To this end, we investigated the role of the compositionally-driven relaxor state in (100 - )BiFeO-SrTiO [BFO-STO], synchrotron X-ray diffraction under bipolar electric-field cycling. The electric-field induced changes to the crystal structure, phase fraction and domain textures were monitored the {111}, {200}, and 1/2{311} Bragg peaks.