High-pressure synthesis, crystal structure, and phase stability relations of a LiNbO3-type polar titanate ZnTiO3 and its reinforced polarity by the second-order Jahn-Teller effect.

A polar LiNbO3-type (LN-type) titanate ZnTiO3 has been successfully synthesized using ilmenite-type (IL-type) ZnTiO3 under high pressure and high temperature. The first principles calculation indicates that LN-type ZnTiO3 is a metastable phase obtained by the transformation in the decompression process from the perovskite-type phase, which is stable at high pressure and high temperature. The Rietveld structural refinement using synchrotron powder X-ray diffraction data reveals that LN-type ZnTiO3 crystallizes into a hexagonal structure with a polar space group R3c and exhibits greater intradistortion of the TiO6 octahedron in LN-type ZnTiO3 than that of the SnO6 octahedron in LN-type ZnSnO3. The estimated spontaneous polarization (75 μC/cm(2), 88 μC/cm(2)) using the nominal charge and the Born effective charge (BEC) derived from density functional perturbation theory, respectively, are greater than those of ZnSnO3 (59 μC/cm(2), 65 μC/cm(2)), which is strongly attributed to the great displacement of Ti from the centrosymmetric position along the c-axis and the fact that the BEC of Ti (+6.1) is greater than that of Sn (+4.1). Furthermore, the spontaneous polarization of LN-type ZnTiO3 is greater than that of LiNbO3 (62 μC/cm(2), 76 μC/cm(2)), indicating that LN-type ZnTiO3, like LiNbO3, is a candidate ferroelectric material with high performance. The second harmonic generation (SHG) response of LN-type ZnTiO3 is 24 times greater than that of LN-type ZnSnO3. The findings indicate that the intraoctahedral distortion, spontaneous polarization, and the accompanying SHG response are caused by the stabilization of the polar LiNbO3-type structure and reinforced by the second-order Jahn-Teller effect attributable to the orbital interaction between oxygen ions and d(0) ions such as Ti(4+).