Journal
NATURE
Volume 538, Issue 7624, Pages 219-+Publisher
NATURE PUBLISHING GROUP
DOI: 10.1038/nature19761
Keywords
-
Categories
Funding
- ERC Starting grant from the EU [ERC 308023]
- Spanish MINECO [FIS2013-48668-C2-1-P]
- Severo Ochoa Excellence Programme [SEV-2013-0295]
- MICITT
- CONICIT
- ICREA Funding Source: Custom
Ask authors/readers for more resources
Flexoelectricity is a property of all dielectric materials whereby they polarize in response to deformation gradients such as those produced by bending(1-5). Although it is generally thought of as a property of dielectric insulators, insulation is not a formal requirement: in principle, semiconductors can also redistribute their free charge in response to strain gradients. Here we show that bending a semiconductor not only generates a flexoelectric-like response, but that this response can in fact be much larger than in insulators. By doping single crystals of wide-bandgap oxides to increase their conductivity, their effective flexoelectric coefficient was increased by orders of magnitude. This large response can be explained by a barrier-layer mechanism that remains important even at the macroscale, where conventional (insulator) flexoelectricity otherwise tends to be small. Our results open up the possibility of using semiconductors as active ingredients in electromechanical transducer applications.
Authors
I am an author on this paper
Click your name to claim this paper and add it to your profile.
Reviews
Recommended
No Data Available