Researchers at Rice University and UC Berkeley have discovered that antiferroelectrics, particularly lead zirconate, demonstrate significantly higher electromechanical responses compared to traditional piezoelectric materials when miniaturized. This breakthrough could lead to the development of more efficient and powerful miniaturized electronic devices.
“We’ve been using piezoelectric materials for decades,” said Rice materials scientist Lane Martin, who is the corresponding author on the study. “Recently there has been a strong motivation to further integrate these materials into new types of devices that are very small ⎯ as you would want to do for, say, a microchip that goes inside your phone or computer. The problem is that these materials are typically just less usable at these small scales.
Lane Martin is Rice University’s Robert A. Welch Professor, professor of materials science and nanoengineering, and director of the Rice Advanced Materials Institute. Credit: Jeff Fitlow/Rice University The researchers wanted to understand how very thin films of antiferroelectrics ⎯ a class of materials that remained understudied until recently due to a lack of access to “model” versions of the materials and to their complex structure and properties ⎯ changed their shape in response to voltage and whether they were likewise susceptible to clamping.with very careful control of the material thickness, quality and orientation.
“With the perfected measurement setup, we can get a resolution of two picometers ⎯ that’s about a thousandth of a nanometer,” Pan said. “But just showing that a shape change happened doesn’t mean we understand what’s going on, so we had to explain it. This was one of the first studies to reveal the mechanisms behind this high performance.
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