Evolution of nonequilibrium states of nonuniform modulated structures in ferroelectrics

Dielectric studies of the relaxation of nonequilibrium states in some polydomain ferroelectrics are presented. The domain structures in TGS and Rb 2 ZnCl 4 crystals with rectangular and slim hysteresis loops respectively are shown to exhibit sufficiently different dynamical properties. In TMA-ZnCl 4 , the transition under uniaxial stresses to the complicated modulated state is accompanied only with anomalies of the polarization kinetics. In all these crystals, the slow thermally activated relaxation follows the power law. On the assumption that relaxation centers are noninteracting probable spectra of the distribution of potential barriers in energy are reconstructed from the data. The spectra critically depend on the states of domain structure, surface and defects.