Direct simultaneous measurement of electrocaloric effect and hysteresis loss heating in ferroelectrics.

Electrocaloric effect and loss-induced self-heating are simultaneously investigated in single-crystalline relaxor 0.9Pb(Mg1/3Nb2/3)O3-0.1PbTiO3 by a direct, high-resolution method. Transients of the total temperature change for few-cycle electric field pulses allow to distinguish and individually determine the contributions from electrocaloric effect and self-heating with millikelvin temperature and submillisecond temporal resolution. Simultaneous dielectric measurements make the comparison of observed self-heating to hysteresis losses possible, where very good agreement is found. The loss factor as a figure of merit for electrocaloric materials is directly obtained from the combined determination of caloric temperature change and losses. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]