Electrical field control of the in-plane domains in PMN-PT 011

In a previous experiment on WISH (RB2310462) we studied the evolution of the crystal structure and domain population in a single crystal of PMN-PT with the electric field applied along the 011 pseudo-cubic direction. In the experiment we explored the HLL plane constituted by the out-of-plane 011 and the in-plane 100 reflections. The application of an electric field significantly alters the ratio of polar and non-polar domains. The system remains rhombohedral without transitioning to the expected orthorhombic phase in the high field regime and the final state consists of two polar domains characterized by the polar direction being out of plane, close to the 011 direction. We ask additional beamtime on WISH to collect the HL-L scattering plane perpendicular to the previously investigated HLL plane. This configuration will allow us to directly probe the evolution of these domains upon application of electric field and correlate this with the macroscopic strain measurements.