Superelastic ferroelectric micropillar with large hysteresis and surper-durability

Abstract Hysteresis and durability are generally on the opposite sides of a trade-off for superelastic materials (1-10). We herein break this trade-off and report that BaTiO3 (BT) micropillars present size-dependent superelasticity and possess simultaneous large hysteresis and super-durability, sustaining up to 108 cycles without functional degradation and structural failure. The super-durability was attributed to the small stress to drive ferroelastic switching and the moderate mismatch stress between different ferroelectric variants, that are much smaller than the dislocation nucleation activation stress and the compression strength of BT pillars (11-13). These discoveries enable ferroelectric micropillars many promising applications such as microdampers, and also provide significant insight into developing superelastic materials with enhanced durability.