Episode 9: Stacking materials induces ferroelectricity into wurtzites

MRS Bulletin Materials News Podcast · May 19, 2025 · 5m

In this podcast episode, MRS Bulletin’s Sophia Chen interviews Beth Dickey from Carnegie Mellon University about her new approach to inducing ferroelectricity into a material. Dickey’s research group worked with a class of materials known as wurtzites. The researchers specifically studied aluminum nitride and zinc oxide, which are not ferroelectric in their pristine form at room temperature. However, alloys of these materials are ferroelectric. When the researchers stacked the ferroelectric alloy with a non-ferroelectric wurtzite and applied electric fields to the material, they found that…