PolyU researchers shine in the 2019 Guangdong Province Science and Technology Award, a total of five out of 179 researches on the award list are honoured from PolyU, received two first class prizes on natural science, one second-class prize on natural science and two second-prizes on scientific and technological progress.
Professor Dai Jiyan, Professor of the Department of Applied Physics (AP) rewarded the first-class prize on natural science with the study of ferroelectric and dielectric physics. Prof. Dai and the research team were working on the project since early 2000, which has developed a new series of perovskite ferroelectric materials (in the form of thin film, nanotube, and nanowire) with low dielectric loss, high-quality factor and large piezo-response. These excellent properties have been attributed to relaxation-type ferroelectric characteristics forming polarized nanodomains which greatly improve ferroelectric energy storage density. Such materials have high potential applications in 5G microwave devices such as dielectric tuning, phase shifter, as well as dynamic random-access memory and piezoelectric transducers.
In this project, Prof. Dai’s group has done pioneer works in fabrication and piezoelectric microscopy (PFM) study of lead zirconate titanate nanowires and bismuth ferrite nanotubes. Compared with ferroelectric thin films, these nanostructured piezoelectric materials are expected to achieve larger piezo-response with potential applications in miniatured transducer devices. Such pioneer works have been followed up by many research groups demonstrating their high impact. Two research papers had being listed among 10 selected papers for the award, as well as that was cited many times worldwide.
Figure 1 &2. SEM images of PZT nanowires
Figure 3 &4. SEM images of BFO nanotubes in nanochannel porous alumina
Figure 5. Piezoelectric hysteresis loop of a single BFO nanotube measured by pirzoresponse force microscopy.
News coverage:
粵科技獎出爐港校七項目奪殊榮 涉5G新材料生物醫學灣區合作成果湧現
For media inquiries and interviews with the scientists, please send an email to apdept@polyu.edu.hk.
