Published online by Cambridge University Press: 10 August 2015
The effect of Dy-doping on the dielectric nonlinearity was investigated in Mn and V-doped BaTiO3 multilayer ceramic capacitors under the same grain size condition, which was described by the Preisach model utilizing the first order reversal curve (FORC) distribution. The dielectric constants in both low and high field region could be enhanced by the Dy-doping, and it was associated with the increase of both reversible and irreversible FORC distributions near zero bias, whereas there was little variation in the saturation polarization that scales to the magnitude of spontaneous polarization. These results demonstrate that both reversible and irreversible domain wall motions are enhanced by Dy-donor incorporation in BaTiO3 resulting in softening of the dielectrics and increase of dielectric constants, which is supposed to be caused by the decrease of the pinning sources such as defect dipoles formed by the oxygen vacancies and their interaction with the domain walls.