Morphotropic Phase Boundary in Irradiated Ferroelectric Polymers.

Liu, Yuquan; Tong, Hui; Li, Chenyi; Qi, Wei; Zhou, Huamin; Liu, Yang · Adv Mater · 2025

basic_science · Level V

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Abstract

Morphotropic phase boundary (MPB) enables a large piezoelectric effect in ferroelectric polymers. However, till now MPB has only been observed in a few polymers, which is induced by compositional tuning of the polymer composition. Here a distinct approach to design MPB in ferroelectric polymers is reported via ion irradiation. Without changing composition as required by the conventional compositional approach, the formation of helix/trans MPB in ferroelectric polymers is achieved upon increasing the irradiation dose, near which a substantially enhanced piezoelectric coefficient d<sub>33</sub> of -69.8 pC N<sup>-1</sup> is observed. The effectiveness of this method is demonstrated by using different sources of irradiation and polymer compositions, which offers a general and scalable postprocessing tool to effectively improve the piezoelectric response of ferroelectric polymers.