Crystallography and Chemistry of Perovskites

The perovskite family of oxides is probably the best studied family of oxides. Despite the simplicity of the original perovskite crystal structure related to the mineral perovskite CaTiO3, this family of compounds shows an enormous variety of structural modifications and variants. In the following text, we describe several examples of perovskites and discuss the implications of structural distortions and nonstoichiometry on their electronic and magnetic properties. Keywords: perovskite; ferroelectric; antiferromagnet; multiferroic; high-temperature superconductor; Jahn–Teller; spin state transition