Acoustic spectroscopy of lithium niobate: Elastic and piezoelectric coefficients

We report simultaneous measurement of the complete set of elastic and piezoelectric coefficients of lithium niobate (LiNbO3), which has trigonal crystal symmetry (3m point group) and thus six independent elastic-stiffness coefficients Cij, four piezoelectric coefficients eij, and two dielectric coefficients κij. We used a single specimen: an oriented rectangular parallelepiped about 5 mm in size. Our measurement method, acoustic spectroscopy, focuses on the crystal’s macroscopic resonance frequencies and is sensitive to any property that affects those frequencies. We overcame the principal obstacle to precise measurements—mode misidentification—by using laser-Doppler interferometry to detect the displacement distribution on a vibrating surface. This approach yields unambiguous mode identification. We used 56 resonances ranging in frequency from 0.3 to 1.2 MHz and determined the Cij and eij with known κij. The ten unknowns always converged to the same values even with unreasonable initial guesses. The Cij uncertainty averages 0.09% for the diagonal Cij. The eij uncertainty averages 5%. All our coefficients fall within the (surprisingly wide) error limits of previous (conventional) measurements.