Applications of Instabilities in Perovskite Structures

Perovskite structures can exhibit a wide range of structural modifications based on changes in octahedral ordering and tilting, cation coordination, and bond lengths and angles. Often these materials are designed to operate near intrinsic structural or chemical instabilities to take advantage of the resultant superior materials properties. This has directly led to the use of perovskites in numerous applications including piezoelectricity, high temperature superconductivity, ferroelectricity, and many others. This presentation will feature a short discussion of the origin of these instabilities followed by recent examples of how this can be applied in the search for new piezoelectric materials, magnetoelectric materials, and capacitor materials.