Shouguo Huang

Oxygen-vacancy-related dielectric relaxations in SrTiO3 at high temperatures

We herein present comparative investigation on the dielectric properties of both ceramic and single crystal SrTiO3 samples in the temperature from room temperature to 1073 K. Two relaxations were observed in both samples. They behave as Debye-like and relaxor-like relaxations in ceramic and single crystal samples, respectively. These relaxations were found to be bulk effect related to oxygen-vacancy. In single crystal sample, the relaxations result from the long-range conduction associated with singly and doubly charged oxygen vacancies. In ceramic sample, the oxygen vacancies are more strongly localized in relation to the crystal. This leads to a new phenomenon of formation and dissociation of oxygen vacancy clusters before the vacancies make contribution to the long-range conduction. The low-temperature relaxation in ceramic sample was determined by the clustering and dissociating processes of the oxygen vacancies. The high-temperature relaxation in ceramic sample was found to share the same mechanism a...

Revisiting the low-temperature dielectric properties of ZnO

Electric modulus spectroscopy and impedance analysis were used to investigate the low-temperature (∼100–333 K) dielectric properties of ZnO crystals. Two relaxations were observed. The low-temperature relaxation (R1) features a thermally activated behavior resulting from the bulk response. Our results convincingly demonstrate that this relaxation is a polaronic relaxation. The relaxing species for R1 are localized holes created by zinc vacancies instead of the commonly agreed oxygen vacancies. The high-temperature relaxation (R2) is a Maxwell-Wagner relaxation due to skin-layer effect as it can be eliminated by grinding off the sample surface. The inhomogeneous distribution of zinc interstitials leads to the formation of the skin layer. Interestingly, an abnormal dielectric behavior contrary to the thermally activated behavior was found for the R2 relaxation. This abnormal behavior was confirmed to be related to the positive temperature coefficient of resistance due to the metal-insulator transition occur...