Print PageThere is good news for the global effort to reduce the amount of lead in the environment and for the growing array of technologies that rely upon the piezoelectric effect. A lead-free alternative to the current crop of piezoelectric materials has been identified by researchers with the U.S. Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) and the University of California (UC), Berkeley.
The key to this success is the use of bismuth ferrite, a compound with a perovskite crystal structure, meaning it has crystal planes of oxygen and bismuth atoms alternating with planes of oxygen and iron atoms. These planes can move relative to one other when the proper strain is applied. The research team discovered that the piezoelectric effect in bismuth ferrite becomes significantly enhanced in response to the application of epitaxial strain -compression in the direction of its crystal planes.
"We have demonstrated that epitaxial strain can be used to create a large piezoelectric responses in thin films of bismuth ferrite," says Ramamoorthy Ramesh, a materials scientist who led this research. "The piezoelectric effect is reversible when the strain is relaxed."
Ramesh holds joint appointments with Berkeley Lab's Materials Sciences Division and UC Berkeley's Department of Materials Science and Engineering and the Department of Physics. He is the senior author on a paper published in the journal Science entitled: "A Strain-Driven Morphotropic Phase Boundary in BiFeO3."
"In principle, the strain-driven piezoelectric effect we have observed in bismuth ferrite should be generic to other lead-free perovskites as well," Ramesh says, "akin to chemically driven effects that are now well established in the manganites, cuprates and relaxors."
The most widely used piezoelectric materials today are lead-based perovskite compounds, especially lead zirconate titanate (PZT). These perovskites display superior piezoelectric properties in areas where the phase of their crystal structure abruptly changes. Such areas, known as morphotropic phase boundaries, are produced via complex chemical alloying of a PZT-type perovskite's metal and oxide constituents. While the technology is well established, lead is a potent neurotoxin that poses a serious threat to human health, especially children, and to the environment.
"We have produced the piezoelectric effect by taking thin films of bismuth ferrite and applying a huge epitaxial strain," says Robert Zeches, a member of Ramesh's UC Berkeley research group who was the first author on the Science paper. "The bismuth ferrite wants to be in a rhombohedral phase but the epitaxial strain forces it into a tetragonal phase, creating a morphotropic phase boundary."
If the strain is removed, the bismuth ferrite crystal structure reverts back to its original rhombohedral-like phase, Zeches says. By alternating between squeezing and relaxing, the researchers can shuttle the material back and forth between the two phases.
Ramesh and his group are now testing their strain-driven piezoelectric technique on other perovskites. They are also exploring the use of epitaxial strain to generate other phenomena such as magnetoresistance. Noting that the reversible phase changes in the bismuth ferrite films are accompanied by changes of a few nanometers in the height of the sample surface - a substantial change on this scale - Ramesh and his colleagues believe their results make bismuth ferrite an attractive candidate for data storage applications.
Source: Berkeley Lab
Top image of Ramamoorthy Ramesh source: Berkeley Lab
