The charges in live cells interact with or produce electric fields, which results in enormous dielectric responses, flexoelectricity, and related phenomena. Here we report on a contraction of Schizosaccharomyces pombe (fission yeast) cells induced by magnetic fields, as observed using a phase-sensitive projection imaging technique. Unlike electric fields, magnetic fields only act on moving char...

Piezoelectricity—the coupling between strain and electrical polarization, allowed 2 Zubko, Catalan, Tagantsev by symmetry in a restricted class of materials—is at the heart of many devices that permeate our daily life. Since its discovery in the 1880’s by Pierre and Jacques Curie, the piezoelectric effect has found use in everything from submarine sonars to cigarette lighters. By contrast, flex...

The solutions for the minimizers of the energy density f (q, p) = Aq2 + Bq4 + p2 + gA,B + ( ) β κ − + | | + | | ′ ′ ′ ′ q p p q q p 2 2 describe the flexoelectric effect with a flexoelectric coupling coefficient β. The order parameters q and p can be visualized as strain and polarisation, respectively. The parameter κ denotes the ratio of intrinsic length scales for q and p. We show that the st...