Octahedral tilt instability of ReO3-type crystals

The octahedron tilt transitions of ABX(3) perovskite-structure materials lead to antipolar arrangements of dipoles, with the low temperature (T) structure having six sublattices polarized along various crystallographic directions. It is shown that an important mechanism driving the transition is long-range dipole-dipole forces acting on both displacive and induced parts of the anion dipole. This acts in concert with short-range repulsion, allowing a gain of electrostatic (Madelung) energy, both dipole-dipole and charge-charge, because the unit cell shrinks when the hard ionic spheres of the rigid octahedron tilt out of a linear alignment.