[Announced by Harbin Institute of Technology, Shenzhen] (School of Materials Science and Engineering/Text, Photo) In September 2019, Chen Zuhuang, a professor at the School of Materials Science and Engineering, Institute of Materials Genetics and Big Data, and Research Center of Flexible Printing Electronic Technology, Harbin Institute of Technology, Shenzhen cooperated with Dr. Lu Xiaoyan at the School of Civil Engineering, Harbin Institute of Technology, and Lane Martin, a professor at the University of California, Berkeley, and observed a large area of ferroelectric PbTiO3 epitaxial thin films with "Domino" type ferroelastic switching. On September 2nd, the research results were published online in Nature Communications, a sub-journal of Nature, with the title of Mechanical force-induced, non-local, and collective ferroelastic switching in epitaxial lead titanate thin films

In this research, "Domino" type large area and nonlocal ferroelastic switching was observed for the first time in ferroelectric epitaxial thin films, which is of great significance for developing low-power consumption, multi-state memory devices, high-sensitivity micro-nano force sensors and piezoelectric actuators. Paper link: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-019-11825-2 (Editor Li Xiaohui)