Physics Colloquium: Driving phase transition in ceramics: an overlooked asset for energy applications

 Phase transitions in insulating ceramics can be driven by an external electrical field. These controllable phase transitions come along with changes in these ceramics, e.g. piezoelectric materials will deform, electro-optic materials will become opaque and electrocaloric materials will heat up. In LIST, we are interested in these materials, theoretically, experimentally and we also look at them for energy-related applications. In this talk, I will explain how we use controllable phase transitions to generate large strain (Kovacova et al., PRB 2014), large entropy change (Moya et al., Nat. Phys. 2015) but also efficient actuators (Glinsek et al., Adv. Funct. Mat. 2020) and cooling prototypes (Torello et al., Science 2020).