Ferroelectric materials use both the pyroelectric effect and piezoelectric effect for energy conversion. A ferroelectric BaTiO3 -based pyro-piezoelectric sensor system is demonstrated to detect temperature and pressure simultaneously. The voltage signal of the device is found to enhance with increasing temperature difference with a sensitivity of about 0.048 V °C-1 and with applied pressure with a sensitivity of about 0.044 V kPa-1 . Moreover, no interference appears in the output voltage signals when piezoelectricity and pyroelectricity are conjuncted in the device. A novel 4 × 4 array sensor system is developed to sense real-time temperature and pressure variations induced by a finger. This system has potential applications in machine intelligence and man-machine interaction.
Nanoribbons and flat nanosheets of Ga2O3 have been synthesized by evaporating GaN at high temperature with the presence of oxygen. The as-synthesized nanoribbons and nanosheets are pure, structurally uniform, single crystalline, and free from dislocations. The nanoribbons and the nanosheets all have monoclinic β-Ga2O3 structure. The flat top and bottom surfaces for both nanoribbons and nanosheets are ±(100), the side surfaces are ±(010) and ±(101̄) for nanoribbons and ±(010), ±(101̄) and ±(212̄) for nanosheets. The axis direction of nanoribbon growth is along either [001] or [010].
Emulation of human senses via electronic means has long been a grand challenge in research of artificial intelligence as well as prosthetics, and is of pivotal importance for developing intelligently accessible and natural interfaces between human/environment and machine. Unlike other senses (seeing, hearing, smelling and tasting), capability of skin for touch sensing remains stubbornly difficult to be mimicked, which necessitates the development of large-scale pressure sensor arrays with high spatial-resolution, high-sensitivity and fast response. In this talk, we present a novel design of nanowire LED arrays, which can be used to directly record the strain distribution by piezo-phototronic effect. This work is published on Nature Photonics.1
Transition-metal dichalcogenides (TMDCs) have recently open a new perspective in electronics and optoelectronics due to their unique planar crystal structures and incredible physical characteristics. Strong in-plane piezoelectricity is their unique property owing to non-centrosymmetric structure, differing from other two dimension (2D) materials, such as graphene and black phosphorus. In this work, we develop a flexible photodiode based on monolayer MoS2 lateral p-n homojunction with significant enhancement in photoresponsivity and detectivity. Piezo-phototronic effect is used to achieve this enhancement by adjusting the barrier height and broadening depletion zone at p-n junction interface under external strain. The wider depletion zone benefits the separation and transport of photogenerated carriers, thus enhancing the photocurrent. When a 0.51% external static tensile strain was applied, the photoresponsivity and detectivity are improved up to 1162 A W−1 and 1.72 × 1012 Jones, with about 619% and 319% enhancement compared with strain-free state, respectively. Consequently, this work provides an effective strategy to utilize unavoidable external strain to improve TMDCs-based optoelectronic devices performance. At the same time, it has reference meaning to achieve flexible, low-consumption and high-performance 2D devices without electric gate-control.