In the realm of energy storage and advanced materials, a team of researchers from various institutions, including Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, University of California, Berkeley, and University of California, San Diego, has made a significant discovery. They have identified a new family of lead-free, antiferroelectric materials, which could have promising applications in the energy sector.
Antiferroelectrics are materials that can switch between different electrical states under an applied electric field. This property makes them potentially useful for energy storage, sensing, and actuation applications. However, known antiferroelectrics are relatively rare and mainly based on a limited set of perovskite materials. The research team, led by Louis Alaerts and Lane W. Martin, has introduced a new family of weberite-type antiferroelectrics, identified through a large-scale, first-principles computational search.
The researchers developed a screening methodology that connects lattice dynamics to antipolar distortions, predicting that La3NbO7 could exhibit antiferroelectricity. They confirmed this prediction through the synthesis and characterization of epitaxial La3NbO7 thin films. These films displayed the signature double hysteresis loops of an antiferroelectric material and clear evidence of an antipolar ground state structure from transmission electron microscopy.
The antiferroelectricity in La3NbO7 is simpler than most known antiferroelectrics and can be explained by a Kittel-type mechanism involving the movement of niobium atoms in an oxygen octahedron through a single phonon mode. This results in a smaller change in volume during the field-induced phase transition. Additionally, La3NbO7 combines a high threshold field with a high breakdown field, which opens up opportunities for energy-storage applications.
The discovery of this new weberite-type family of materials offers many opportunities to tune electrical and temperature response, especially through substitutions on the rare-earth site. This work, published in the journal Nature Communications, demonstrates a successful data-driven theory-to-experiment discovery of an entirely new family of antiferroelectrics and provides a blueprint for the future design of ferroic materials.
For the energy industry, this research could lead to the development of more efficient and compact energy storage devices. Antiferroelectric materials like La3NbO7 could potentially be used in capacitors that can store and release large amounts of energy quickly, which is crucial for applications such as electric vehicles, renewable energy integration, and grid stabilization. Furthermore, the tunability of these materials offers the possibility of tailoring their properties to specific energy storage needs, making them a versatile option for various energy storage applications.
This article is based on research available at arXiv.