ELECTROSTRICTION SOLITON AS A CLUSTER MODEL IN THE HIGH-TEMPERATURE PHASE OF A HYDROGEN-CONTAINING FERROELECTRIC

The polarization clusters observed experimentally in the high-temperat ure phase of ferroelectrics are interpreted as solitons in the microsc opic pseudospin formalism. These solitons are the result of modulation of the pseudospin interaction constant by acoustic vibrations, which represents an electrostriction interaction from the phenomenological p oint of view. The influence of higher-order nonlinearities present in the pseudospin subsystem and the damping of acoustic modes on a solito n is analyzed. (C) 1998 American Institute of Physics.