https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2023/06/230609160612.htm

Their recent work published in Science explores materials that are ferroelectric, or have a spontaneous electric polarization that can be reversed by the application of an external electric field. Recently discovered wurtzite ferroelectrics, which are mainly composed of materials that are already incorporated in semiconductor technology for integrated circuits, allow for the integration of new power-efficient devices for applications such as non-volatile memory, electro-optics, and energy harvesting. One of the biggest challenges of wurtzite ferroelectrics is that the gap between the electric fields required for operation and the breakdown field is very small.

"Significant efforts are devoted to increasing this margin, which demands a thorough understanding of the effect of films' composition, structure, and architecture on the polarization switching ability at practical electric fields," said Carnegie Mellon post-doctoral researcher Sebastian Calderon, who is the lead author of the paper.