Spin state transition and intermetallic charge transfer can essentially change material structural and physical properties with a fashion of excluding external chemical doping. However, these two effects have rarely been found to occur sequentially in a specific material. In this article, we show the realization of these two phenomena in a perovskite oxide PbCoO3 with a simple ABO3 composition under high pressure. PbCoO3 possesses a peculiar A-and B-site ordered charge distribution Pb 2+ Pb 4+ 3Co 2+ 2Co 3+ 2O12 with insulating behavior at ambient conditions. The high spin Co 2+ gradually changes to low spin with increasing pressure up to about 15 GPa, leading to the anomalous increase of resistance magnitude. Between 15 GPa and 30 GPa, the intermetallic charge transfer occurs between Pb 4+ and Co 2+ cations. The accumulated charge-transfer effect triggers a metal-insulator transition as well as a first-order structural phase transition toward a Tetra.-I phase at the onset of ~20 GPa near room temperature. On further compression over 30 GPa, the charge transfer completes, giving rise to another first-order structural transformation toward a Tetra.-II phase and the reentrant electrical insulating behavior.

Two negative thermal expansions (NTEs) with different mechanisms were observed in solid solutions of perovskite-type oxides PbCrO3 and PbTiO3. PbCr1–x Ti x O3 was found to adopt a cubic structure the same as that of PbCrO3 for x ≤ 0.6 and a PbTiO3-type tetragonal structure for x ≥ 0.7. The NTE observed at x ≤ 0.6 was accompanied by a cubic-to-cubic phase transition originating from the rearrangement of Pb2+/Pb4+ in a complex local structure called a charge glass. The volume shrinkage of −2.5% observed in PbCrO3 is sufficiently large despite the absence of intermetallic charge transfer, which is the origin of pressure-induced cubic-to-cubic phase transition and 9.8% volume collapse. The NTE in the tetragonal phase was caused by the ferroelectric-to-paraelectric phase transition, the same as in PbTiO3. We succeeded in significantly lowering the working temperature of PbTiO3 as an NTE material by Cr substitution while retaining a large volume shrinkage of 0.6%.