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Ferroelectricity: 100 years since its discovery

11 Nov 2020 James Dacey

Today, ferroelectric materials have some amazing applications. You will find them in many technologies including telescope optics, medical ultrasound devices and energy storage devices. But when ferroelectricity was first observed 100 years ago by the physicist Joseph Valasek, the discovery was greeted with little fanfare among the physics community.

Watch this video to discover how ferroelectricity transformed from academic obscurity to a key part of several transformative technologies. For a deep dive into the history of ferroelectricity take a look at this feature from the November 2020 issue of Physics World, written by Amar S Bhalla at the University of Texas at San Antonio and Avadh Saxena at Los Alamos National Laboratory.

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