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Continuing posting #SomeNiceThings... And this really is lovely science. I'll try to explain...
In a ferroelectric the positions of positive and negative charges don't balance one another, so there are internal electric fields within each unit cell (tiny repeat unit) of the material.
Now the thing that defines a ferroelectric is not just the non balancing charges, but the fact that the direction of the field can be in different directions within the crystal.
The people have spoken! Or at least, about 60 of my followers have voted in a poll. And the decision of that highly democratic process is that today I will be tweeting about our recent paper on X-ray diffraction (XRD), with @PHGriff as lead author.
The paper actually came out just before Christmas, but it’s excellent to be tweeting about it now because @PHGriff passed his PhD viva last week! Here’s a link to the full paper which was an Editor’s Pick in Journal of Applied Physics. aip.scitation.org/doi/full/10.10…
We’re using X-ray diffraction to study structures with alternating layers of porous and non-porous gallium nitride. If you’d like to know why on earth we’d do that, here’s a thread I wrote earlier about why these structures are super useful in LEDs:
