The revival of electrostriction

Jiacheng Yu ^1,4 Lucile Féger ⁴ Antoine Pautonnier ⁴ Sanjeev Nayak ² Abdelali Zaki ^1,4 Danniel Tanner ^1,3 Sandrine Coste ⁴ Maud Barré ⁴ Pamir Alpay ² Eric Bousquet ³ Philippe Lacorre ⁴ Pierre-Eymeric Janolin ¹

¹SPMS lab, Universite Paris-Saclay, CentraleSupelec, Gif-sur-Yvette, France
²Department of Materials Science and Engineering and Institute of Materials Science, University of Connecticut, Corr, CT, USA
³Q-MAT, CESAM, Institut de Physique, Universite De Liege, Liege, Belgium
⁴Institut des Molécules et Matériaux du Mans, Le Mans Université, Le Mans, France
⁵Department of Physics, University of Connecticut, Storr, CT, USA
⁶X-Ray Science Division, Argonne National Laboratory, Lemont, Il, USA

The recent discovery of "giant" electrostriction and its exceptionnal electro-mechanical properties have triggered a renewed interest for this electro-mechanical coupling, quadratic in nature, that enables to make piezoelectric even centrosymmetric materials and that exists in all dieletrics.

Several misconceptions exist about electrostriction, about its fundamental aspects as well as about its potential for applications. We shall provide an updated picture of this phenomenon and its interest, underlying the advantages of this phenomenon (strain levels comparable to piezoelectric ones, low losses, low temperature dependence, no need for polarization, lead-free, high effective piezoelectric coefficients and so on...).

Through a combination of theoretical derivations and DFT calculations, we shall also provide an account of our recent progress, including our efficient methodology to calculate electrostriction through DFT without electric field as well as the possibility to have arbitrarily large response through strain engineering in electrostrictive thin films.

We shall also report on the definition we put forward of "giant" electrostriction, showing that many more such materials exist. Our study on the LAMOX family, one of the rare examples of bulk "giant" electrostrictors, unveil the interplay between the elastic, electric, and electromechanical properties of such materials and expands the number of "giant" electrostrictors with remarkable properties.

Finally, the material selection for electrostrictors has been bound by the so-called Newnham relation that relates the electrostrictive coefficient to the ratio of elastic properties divided by dielectric ones. Our recent results from data mining and intensive DFT calculations show that there is a wealth of materials exhibiting classical electrostriction with performances similar to the "giant" ones but that do not suffer from the same limitation in terms of frequency.