Elasticity of CaTiO3, SrTiO3 and BaTiO3 perovskites up to 3.0 Gpa: the effect of crystallographic structure

Elasticity of CaTiO₃, SrTiO₃ and BaTiO₃ perovskites has been experimentally investigated as a function of pressure up to 3.0 GPa in a liquid-medium piston cylinder apparatus using a high precision ultrasonic interferometric technique. Specimens used are hot-pressed fine-grained (3–10 μm) polycrystalline aggregates with low porosity (<1.5%). Compressional and shear wave velocities and their pressure derivatives have been measured. The results are compared with previous studies on other perovskites and the role of structural transitions is examined. We find that the role of Ti-O₆ polyhedral tilting (such as observed in CaTiO₃) is small in the sense that a single well-defined general trend exists in perovskites with a wide range of tilting angles, although there is suggestion that cubic perovskites have slightly higher bulk modulus than orthorhombic perovskites. In contrast, cation-anion displacement that changes crystal symmetry from cubic to tetragonal in BaTiO₃ has very large effects on elasticity. This distortion significantly reduces the bulk modulus (but not much the shear modulus) and results in an unusually large pressure derivative of bulk modulus (dK/dP～10). A large change in elasticity in BaTiO₃ associated with the structural transition (without a significant volume change) is a clear example of the breakdown of the Birch's law between densities and elastic wave velocities.