Crumpling charged film sizes up the flexoelectric effect

Flexoelectric Effect in Solids

Piezoelectricity—the coupling between strain and electrical polarization, allowed 2 Zubko, Catalan, Tagantsev by symmetry in a restricted class of materials—is at the heart of many devices that permeate our daily life. Since its discovery in the 1880’s by Pierre and Jacques Curie, the piezoelectric effect has found use in everything from submarine sonars to cigarette lighters. By contrast, flex...

Threshold Flexoelectric Effect in Nematic Liquid Crystal

Giant flexoelectric effect through interfacial strain relaxation.

Interfacial strain gradients in oxide epitaxial thin films provide an interesting opportunity to study flexoelectric effects and their potential applications. Oxide epitaxial thin films can exhibit giant and tunable flexoelectric effects, which are six or seven orders of magnitude larger than those in conventional bulk solids. The strain gradient in an oxide epitaxial thin film can generate an ...

The Crumpling Transition Revisited

The “crumpling” transition, between rigid and crumpled surfaces, has been object of much discussion over the past years. The common lore is that such transition should be of second order. However, some lattice versions of the rigidity term on fixed connectivity surfaces seem to suggest that the transition is of higher order instead. While some models exhibit what appear to be lattice artifacts,...

Electromechanical coupling in piezoelectric nanobeams due to the flexoelectric effect

The flexoelectric effect is a coupling of polarization and strain gradient, which exists in a wide variety of materials and may lead to strong size-dependent properties at the nanoscale. Based on an extension to the classical beam model, this paper investigates the electromechanical coupling response of piezoelectric nanobeams with different electrical boundary conditions including the effect o...