Call for Papers

Please contact the symposium organizers with questions.

Strain gradients break inversion symmetry and induce flexoelectric polarization in otherwise nonpolar materials, overcoming one of the major constraints imposed on crystalline symmetries by conventional piezoelectricity and ferroelectricity. Flexoelectricity thus presents a new paradigm for manipulating dielectric polarization and associated phenomena, and in recent years it has emerged as a powerful tool to engineer a wide range of materials, structures, and devices, including piezoelectric actuators, field effect transistors, and photodetectors. With rapid advances in characterization techniques and computational algorithms, the gap between theory and experiment is being bridged, and we are gaining unprecedented microscopic understanding of the flexoelectric effect. This enables not only design, development, and optimization of flexoelectric materials, structures and devices, but also provides new insight into novel polar topologies such as vortices, antivortices, and skymions. The symposium intends to bring together materials scientists, condensed matter physicists, electrical engineers, and solid mechanicians working on materials synthesis, device fabrication, modeling, as well as characterization aspects of flexoelectricity to survey the state of the art, exchange ideas, and foster collaborations. Abstracts in both fundamental and applied aspects of flexoelectricity are solicited, and potential topics of interest are listed in the following.

Topics will include:

• Flexoelectricity for design and optimization of functional materials
• Strain gradients in two-dimensional materials, nanostructures, and interfaces
• Effect of flexoelectricity on nontrivial polar topologies
• Modeling, theory and computation of flexoelectric effect
• Characterization and measurement of flexoelectric response
• Design and fabrication of flexoelectric structures and devices
• Flexoelectricity in electromechanical coupling, MEMS, and energy harvesting
• Flexoelectricity in semiconductors, memories, and field effect transistors
• Flexoelectricity in bulk photovoltaics, optoelectronics, and pyroelectrics
• Flexoelectricity in biological systems

Invited Speakers (tentative):

• Nazanin Bassiri-Gharb (Georgia Institute of Technology, USA)
• Gustau Catalan (Catalan Institute of Nanoscience and Nanotechnology, Spain)
• Long-Qing Chen (The Pennsylvania State University, USA)
• Weijin Chen (Sun Yat-Sen University, China)
• Neus Domingo Marimon (Oak Ridge National Laboratory, USA)
• EA Eliseev (Institute for Problems of Materials Science, Ukraine)
• Jiawang Hong (Beijing Institute of Technology, China)
• Boyuan Huang (Southern University of Science and Technology, China)
• Xu Liang (Xi'an Jiaotong Unviersity, China)
• Patrycja Paruch (University of Geneva, Switzerland)
• Li-Hua Shao (Behang University, China)
• Alexander Tagantsev (École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, Switzerland)
• Susan Trolier-Mckinstry (The Pennsylvania State University, USA)
• Chan-Ho Yang (Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology, Republic of Korea)
• Mingmin Yang (University of Science and Technology of China, China)
• Pavlo Zubko (University College London, United Kingdom)

Symposium Organizers