Growth of Large Solid-Solution Piezoelectric Crystals by the BSFT Technique

High performance transducers are not presently available using today's ceramic piezoelectric materials. The lead based complex oxides and their possible solid-solution systems have large dielectric constants, large piezoelectric strain coefficients and high longitudinal coupling constants. But these constants are compositionally dependent. Much more efficient transducers are possible if the lead based oxides can be grown in single crystals of sufficient size. Our proposal is to apply our new growth method, the BSFT technique, to this problem.