Microscope reveals secrets of a material's structure : vimar

Emad Oveisi in front of the “Titan-Themis” microscope © Alain Herzog / 2021 EPFL
EPFL scientists have made an important discovery about the structure of barium titanate, a material used in everyday objects. Their findings refute existing theories on the displacement of the material’s atoms.
Barium titanate is a ferroelectric material used in nearly all electronic devices – computers, smartphones and even electric cars. It’s used to make the sensors and capacitors they run on, for example. “A single smartphone generally has around 700 capacitors containing barium titanate, and trillions of these capacitors are made every year,” says Dragan Damjanovic, an EPFL professor and head of the Group for Ferroelectrics and Functional Oxides at EPFL’s School of Engineering. Despite barium titanate’s widespread use, however, researchers still don’t fully understand how it works. “There are of course theoretical models out there, but some of their key predictions have never been experimentally confirmed. So that’s what we set out to do,” says Damjanovic.

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