Thermally-induced loss of piezoelectricity in ferroelectric Na0.5Bi0.5TiO3–BaTiO3 Report Title The loss of piezoelectricity in ferroelectric sodium bismuth titanate (NBT) in solid solution with barium titanate ((1? x)NBT?xBT) is studied by means of thermal depoling and Raman spectroscopy. In the range 0?x?13%, the highest thermal stability of the piezoelectric coefficients is found in x=13%, fo...

Here we report novel phase-separation behavior accompanying mechanical fracture ("fracture phase separation"), which is observed in polymer solutions. Surprisingly, mechanical fracture becomes a dominant coarsening process of the phase separation. The transition from viscoelastic to fracture phase separation corresponds to the "ductile-to-brittle transition" in fracture of materials under shear...

We report on a newly-developed membrane stiffness-based separation of vesicles using a thermally-assisted acoustophoretic approach. By tuning the temperature, we achieved the separation of vesicles of the same size, shape, and charge but with different stiffness values. It was observed that at a specific transition point, the acoustic contrast factor of vesicles changed sign from positive to ne...

One of the key objectives in the realm of flexible electronics and flexible power sources is to achieve large-area, low-cost, scalable production of flexible systems. In this thesis we propose a new Li-ion battery architecture in a fiber form that could be the building block to large-area, conformal, flexible power sources, achieved through fiber thermal drawing. This architecture is based on t...

We report observations of a new electric fieldand shear-induced many-body phenomenon in the behavior of suspensions. Its origin is dielectrophoresis accompanied by the field-induced phase separation. As a result, a suspension undergoes a field-driven phase separation leading to the formation of a distinct boundary between regions enriched with and depleted of particles. The theoretical predicti...

Quantitative impedance mapping of the spatially inhomogeneous insulator-to-metal transition (IMT) in vanadium dioxide (VO2) is performed with a lateral resolution of 50 nm through near-field scanning microwave microscopy (SMM) at 16 GHz. SMM is used to measure spatially resolved electronic properties of the phase coexistence in an unstrained VO2 film during the electrically as well as thermally...