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Fluctuations, Higher Order Anharmonicities, and Landau Expansion for Barium Titanate
Correct phenomenological description of ferroelectric phase transitions in
barium titanate requires accounting for eighth-order terms in the free energy
expansion, in addition to the conventional sixth-order contributions. Another
unusual feature of BaTiO_3 crystal is that the coefficients B_1 and B_2 of the
terms P_x^4 and P_x^2*P_y^2 in the Landau expansion depend on the temperature.
It is shown that the temperature dependence of B_1 and B_2 may be caused by
thermal fluctuations of the polarization, provided the fourth-order
anharmonicity is anomalously small, i. e. the nonlinearity of P^4 type and
higher-order ones play comparable roles. Non-singular (non-critical)
fluctuation contributions to B_1 and B_2 are calculated in the first
approximation in sixth-order and eighth-order anharmonic constants. Both
contributions increase with the temperature, which is in agreement with
available experimental data. Moreover, the theory makes it possible to
estimate, without any additional assumptions, the ratio of fluctuation
(temperature dependent) contributions to coefficients B_1 and B_2. Theoretical
value of B_1/B_2 appears to be close to that given by experiments.Comment: 5 pages, 1 figur
From Diffusion to Anomalous Diffusion: A Century after Einstein's Brownian Motion
Einstein's explanation of Brownian motion provided one of the cornerstones
which underlie the modern approaches to stochastic processes. His approach is
based on a random walk picture and is valid for Markovian processes lacking
long-term memory. The coarse-grained behavior of such processes is described by
the diffusion equation. However, many natural processes do not possess the
Markovian property and exhibit to anomalous diffusion. We consider here the
case of subdiffusive processes, which are semi-Markovian and correspond to
continuous-time random walks in which the waiting time for a step is given by a
probability distribution with a diverging mean value. Such a process can be
considered as a process subordinated to normal diffusion under operational time
which depends on this pathological waiting-time distribution. We derive two
different but equivalent forms of kinetic equations, which reduce to know
fractional diffusion or Fokker-Planck equations for waiting-time distributions
following a power-law. For waiting time distributions which are not pure power
laws one or the other form of the kinetic equation is advantageous, depending
on whether the process slows down or accelerates in the course of time
Paraelectric in a Strong High-Frequency Field
A change in the effective permittivity of a ferroelectric film in the
paraelectric phase under the action of a strong high-frequency field
(nonequilibrium soft mode heating) is considered. It is shown that this effect
must be most clearly pronounced far from the resonance (\omega_0 << \omega_sm),
rather than for the external field frequency \omega_0 close to the soft mode
frequency \omega_sm. The effective permittivity as a function of the
high-frequency field amplitude is calculated using the phenomenological
approach and within the microscopic theory based on the simple model of a
displacement-type ferroelectric.Comment: 3 two-column page
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