ELASTIC PROPERTIES OF ORTHORHOMBIC KNBO3 SINGLE-CRYSTALS BY BRILLOUIN-SCATTERING

Brillouin light scattering was used to obtain elastic and piezoelectric constants for a single domain orthorhombic KNbO3 single crystal at room temperature and pressure. More than 320 measurements of longitudinal and transverse acoustic wave velocities were obtained in 160 different crystallographic directions. An inversion of these data using the literature values for the dielectric permittivity of KNbO3 resulted in the full set of elastic and piezoelectric constants for the material. It is suggested that the difference between piezoelectric constants obtained by high-and low-frequency methods could be explained by the high-frequency relaxation-type dispersion for the dielectric constant epsilon33 in the GHz region by analogy with BaTiO3. The directional dependence of electromechanical coupling for longitudinal and transverse acoustic waves in KNbO3 was analyzed. The obtained elastic constants were (in GPa): C-11(E)=224(4), C-22(E)=273(5), C-33(e)=245(5), C-44(E)=75(1), C-55(E)=28.5(5), C-66(E)=95(2), C-12(E)=102(5), C-13(E)=182(10), C-23(E)=130(6), where E denotes constant electric field strength.