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The aim of the present paper is to review and briefly discuss recent experimental results on the effect of high pressure (p > 1.5 GPa) on relaxor ferroelectrics, exemplified by Na½Bi½TiO3 and PbMg⅓Nb2/3O3. The main result is that relaxor ferroelectrics present important polar and structural pressure-instabilities, which lead to both phase transitions of the average structure and considerable changes of the local structure. It is in particular the observation of a pressure-induced suppression of the relaxorcharacteristic X-ray diffuse scattering that points to important changes in the local order. The complementary use of Raman spectroscopy, X-ray diffraction and X-ray diffuse scattering allows the proposition of a mechanism for the observed changes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In flux-grown (1-x)NaNbO3-(x)Gd⅓NbO3 solid solution crystals a diffusion of the dielectric permittivity ε maximum grows with x and increases dramatically when x exceeds a threshold value x0 ≈ 0.1. Optical studies by the rotating-polarizer method show that Gd-doping results in a very small mean size of twins and the distribution of the birefringence image becomes very messy. In the x < x0 range the changes of lattice parameters and birefringence corresponding to the ε(T) anomaly were revealed. The results obtained are in line with the assumption that phase transition diffusion in NaNbO3 is a result of the local strains stemmed from the impurities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The relaxor ferroelectric, Sodium Bismuth Titanate, (Na 0.5 Bi 0.5 TiO 3 ), NBT is an A-site substituted distorted perovskite. An extensive temperature-, pressure- and substitution-dependent study of the crystal structure and phase transitions in this compound has been carried out using neutron/x-ray diffraction techniques. This has been complemented with optical, Raman and computational modelling studies. The temperature-dependent investigation shows that NBT undergoes a first phase transition from the high-temperature cubic prototype (Pm &3macr; m) Phase I to Phase II of tetragonal symmetry (P4bm) and then a second one with strong diffuse character to Phase III of rhombohedral symmetry (R3c). The high-pressure study of NBT has revealed an interesting and unusual relaxor-to-antiferroelectric (R3c → Pnma) phase transition. Structural variations as a function of temperature and doping across the (Na 1-x K x ) 0.5 Bi 0.5 TiO 3 (NKBT) series have also been established. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]