Study on dielectric and piezoelectric properties of 0.7 Pb(Mg 1/3 Nb 2/3 )O 3 -0.3 PbTiO 3 single crystal with nano-patterned composite electrode.

Effect of nano-patterned composite electrode and backswitching poling technique on dielectric and piezoelectric properties of 0.7 Pb(Mg _1/3 Nb _2/3 )O ₃ -0.3 PbTiO ₃ was studied in this paper. Composite electrode consists of Mn nano-patterns with pitch size of 200 nm, and a blanket layer of Ti/Au was fabricated using a nanolithography based lift-off process, heat treatment, and metal film sputtering. Composite electrode and backswitching poling resulted in 27% increase of d ₃₃ and 25% increase of dielectric constant, and we believe that this is attributed to regularly defined nano-domains and irreversible rhombohedral to monoclinic phase transition in crystal. The results indicate that nano-patterned composite electrode and backswitching poling has a great potential in domain engineering of relaxor single crystals for advanced devices.