Transparent ferroelectric ceramic lanthanum modified lead titanate zirconate ceramic or (PLZT) presents high optical transmittance, ranging from 0.37 up to 6.5 µm that have a wide range of application for different in optical area. It is possible to find some reports showing the use of PLZT as host for rare earth to be applied as photonic material. In this way, the thermo-optical properties such as the temperature coefficient of the optical path length change (ds/dT) plays an important rule to evaluate the figure of merit of optical materials. Therefore, in this work it was used the Optical Interferometric Method to determine the ds/dT parameter of the PLZT samples as a function of temperature. The experimental results shown a peak at 96 °C for PLZT 9/65/35 and a peak at 86 °C for PLZT 9/65/35 that were related to the maximum temperature of the dielectric constant (Tm) of these materials. The results shown that the IO can be used to determine the phase transition in transparent ceramic samples.
Acknowledgement: We are grateful to the Brazilian Agencies, CAPES, CNPq (process 483683/2010-8 and 208232/2014-1), for the financial support of this work. E. A. Falcão and I. A. Santos also acknowledges UTSA and MeMDRL for hosting him under the NSF/INAMM and NSF ECCS 1002380 programs.