“Springy” Domain Walls featured in Nature Materials

A collaborative effort between MSE at Berkeley, the National Center for Electron Microscopy (NCEM) at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, and the Center for Nanophase Materials Sciences (CNMS) at Oak Ridge National Laboratory identifies a pathway to produce spring-like response in ferroelectric domain walls. The efforts, led by Joshua Agar and Anoop Damodaran in the group of Professor Lane Martin together with Professor Andrew Minor and staff at NCEM and CNMS, produced an unprecedented look at domain wall dynamics in compositionally- and strain-graded ferroelectrics which enabled production of highly-mobile and reversible domain wall motion for the first time in these materials. This work provides novel insights into the nature of energy competition in these materials and has implications for memory, actuation, transducer, and other applications based on these materials. The article on this work can be found here.