Tunability of granular ferroelectric dielectric composites

Electrical tunability of a composite consisting of small ferroelectric spheres randomly dispersed into a dielectric background is studied. A new method to calculate the effective permittivity of such a nonlinear composite is introduced. The method is based on the Bruggeman effective medium theory and a specific model for the nonlinear permittivity of the ferrite. The resulting tunability (defined as a measure of the change in the permittivity due to the bias field) is a continuous function of the volume fraction of the ferroelectric material phase in the composite. As an example, SrTiO3 is studied with two different nontunable background materials.