https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2020/06/200629164152.htm

Researchers have debated the theory behind the mechanism of relaxor ferroelectrics for more than 50 years, said Qing Wang, professor of materials science and engineering at Penn State. While relaxor ferroelectrics are well-recognized, fundamentally fascinating and technologically useful materials, a Nature article commented in 2006 that they were heterogeneous, hopeless messes.

Without a fundamental understanding of the mechanism, little progress has been made in designing new relaxor ferroelectric materials. The new understanding, which relies on both experiment and theoretical modeling, shows that relaxor ferroelectricity in polymers comes from chain conformation disorders induced by chirality. Chirality is a feature of many organic materials in which molecules are mirror images of each other, but not exactly the same. The relaxor mechanism in polymers is vastly different from the mechanism proposed for ceramics whose relaxor behavior originates from chemical disorders.