Fatigue-free dielectric and piezoelectric response in single-crystal BaTiO3 tuned by dislocation imprint.

Dislocations have recently been imprinted into barium titanate single crystals to provide local domain wall pinning sites. Here, we assess the cycling stability under unipolar loading for the interaction between dislocations with [001] line vector and engineered ferroelectric domain walls. We find that a high large-signal piezoelectric strain coefficient (∼2100 pm/V) and dielectric permittivity (20 800) can be obtained without degradation if the topological interaction between domain wall and dislocation line is well chosen to utilize transient and permanent pinning sites. Our findings demonstrate the potential of dislocation engineering for the manipulation of the mobility of domain walls in bulk ferroelectrics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]