Anomalous Skin Effect in the Lead-Free Relaxor NBT

Several x-ray and neutron powder diffraction studies have shown that the room-temperature space group of the lead-free relaxor NBT is monoclinic Cc and not rhombohedral R3c, as was previously believed. Motivated by these findings, we performed room-temperature neutron scattering measurements on a large (3.5 gram) single crystal of the lead-free relaxor NBT. Our data confirm the R3c symmetry for bulk NBT and place a strict bound on the strength of the 1/2(111) superlattice reflection associated with the Cc space group based on the published atomic coordinates. We show that a skin effect, analogous to that reported in the relaxors PZN and PMN-10\%PT, can reconcile our single-crystal data with these other studied. We believe this represents the first evidence of the relaxor skin effect in a lead-free relaxor.