Effects of rare-earth impurity doping on the ferroelectric and photorefractive properties of strontium–barium niobate crystals

Abstract Doping strontium–barium niobate (SBN) crystals with rare earth (RE) impurities strongly lowers the ferroelectric phase transition T c which results in a significant enhancement of the dielectric permittivity and electrooptic coefficients and in a simultaneous decrease of the coercive field E c . In photorefractive SBN:Ce crystals co-doped with a non-photorefractive impurity La we studied the hysteresis dependence of the two-beam coupling gain Γ on the external field.