Abstract
Oxygen-deficient Sr$_2$ScGaO$_5$ single crystals with a cubic perovskite structure were grown by the floating-zone technique. The transparent crystals of this pure 3D oxygen electrolyte are metastable at ambient temperature, showing one-sixth of all oxygen positions vacant. While neutron single-crystal diffraction, followed by maximum entropy analysis, revealed a strong anharmonic displacements for the oxygen atoms, a predominant formation of ScO$_6$ octahedra and GaO$_4$ tetrahedra is indicated by Raman spectroscopic studies, resulting in a complex oxygen defect structure with short-range order. Temperature-dependent X-ray powder diffraction (XPD) and neutron powder diffraction (NPD) studies reveal the cubic Sr$_2$ScGaO$_5$ to be thermodynamically stable only above 1400 °C, while the stable modification below this temperature shows the brownmillerite framework with orthorhombic symmetry. Cubic Sr$_2$ScGaO$_5$ remains surprisingly kinetically stable upon heating from ambient temperature to 1300 °C, indicating a huge inertia for the retransformation toward the thermodynamically stable brownmillerite phase. Ionic conductivity investigated by impedance spectroscopy was found to be 10$^{–4}$ S/cm at 600 °C, while oxygen 18O/16O isotope exchange indicates a free oxygen mobility to set in at around 500 °C.