The past decade has witnessed the tremendous scientific and technological potential of nanoscale flexoelectricity in solids. flexoelectric effect describes universal generation electric polarization response to strain gradients could be inversely enhanced at reduced dimensions. Based on this unique scaling effect, shown exciting physical phenomena, promising novel electronic, electromechanical,...

We report a low-voltage and submillisecond-response polymerstabilized hyper-twisted-nematic (HTN) liquid crystal cell with a large dielectric anisotropy host mixture. To correct the measured voltagedependent transmittance, we have to take the voltage shielding effect of the alignment layers into consideration. Both Kerr effect and flexoelectro-optic effect contribute to the observed induced bir...

We present a topology optimization framework to design periodic composites comprised of piezoelectric constituents that exhibit large flexoelectric constants. The novelty the approach is it leverages representative volume element (RVE)-based computational homogenization enables analysis where characteristic dimensions microstructure are significantly smaller than those structure, and as such re...

Flexoelectricity allows a dielectric material to polarize in response to a mechanical bending moment and, conversely, to bend in response to an electric field. Compared with piezoelectricity, flexoelectricity is a weak effect of little practical significance in bulk materials. However, the roles can be reversed at the nanoscale. Here, we demonstrate that flexoelectricity is a viable route to le...

The bending-induced polarization of barium titanate single crystals has been measured with an aim to elucidate the origin of the large difference between theoretically predicted and experimentally measured flexoelectricity in this material. The results indicate that part of the difference is due to polar regions (short-range order) that exist above T(C) and up to T*≈200-225 °C. Above T*, howeve...

Flexoelectricity in thin films has emerged as an effective electromechanical response owing to appealing scaling law and universal existence. However, current studies show limited out-of-plane converse flexoelectric effect (CFE) of ultra-thin transition metal dichalcogenides (TMDs) when compared their conventional in-plane piezoresponse. Here, we report flexoresponse atomically TMDs such molybd...