Large and electric field tunable superelasticity in BaTiO3 crystals predicted by an incremental domain switching criterion

Superelasticity is very common in shape memory alloys but is rather difficult to realize in ferroelectric ceramics and had never appeared in normal ferroelectric single crystals. Here we show that guided by a proposed incremental 90 degrees domain switching criterion, large and electricfield-tunable superelastic strains up to 0.85% has been realized in a specially poled BaTiO3 crystal cube via compression loading/unloading with a positive dc bias electric field along the poling direction. Moreover, the tunable superelasticity has a large damping factor of up to 0.76, which is very promising in intelligent damping devices. (C) 2013 American Institute of Physics. [http://dx.doi.org/10.1063/1.4795330]