RESUMEN
Electrical switching of ferroelectric domains and subsequent domain wall motion promotes strong piezoelectric activity, however, light scatters at refractive index discontinuities such as those found at domain wall boundaries. Thus, simultaneously achieving large piezoelectric effect and high optical transmissivity is generally deemed infeasible. Here, it is demonstrated that the ferroelectric domains in perovskite Pb(In1/2 Nb1/2 )O3 -Pb(Mg1/3 Nb2/3 )O3 -PbTiO3 domain-engineered crystals can be manipulated by electrical field and mechanical stress to reversibly and repeatably, with small hysteresis, transform the opaque polydomain structure into a highly transparent monodomain state. This control of optical properties can be achieved at very low electric fields (less than 1.5 kV cm-1 ) and is accompanied by a large (>10 000 pm V-1 ) piezoelectric coefficient that is superior to linear state-of-the-art materials by a factor of three or more. The coexistence of tunable optical transmissivity and high piezoelectricity paves the way for a new class of photonic devices.
RESUMEN
Carbon nanostructures with precisely controlled shapes are difficult materials to synthesize. A facet-selective-catalytic process was thus proposed to synthesize polymer-linked carbon nanostructures with different shapes, covering straight carbon nanofiber, carbon nano Y-junction, carbon nano-hexapus, and carbon nano-octopus. A thermal chemical vapor deposition process was applied to grow these multi-branched carbon nanostructures at temperatures lower than 350 °C. Cu nanoparticles were utilized as the catalyst and acetylene as the reaction gas. The growth of those multi-branched nanostructures was realized through the selective growth of polymer-like sheets on certain indexed facets of Cu catalyst. The vapor-facet-solid (VFS) mechanism, a new growth mode, has been proposed to interpret such a growth in the steps of formation, diffusion, and coupling of carbon-containing oligomers, as well as their final precipitation to form nanostructures on the selective Cu facets.
