Review of high-throughput approaches to search for piezoelectric nitrides

Abstract

Piezoelectric materials are commonplace in modern devices, and the prevalence of these materials is poised to increase in the years to come. The majority of known piezoelectrics are oxide materials, due in part to the related themes of a legacy of ceramists building off of mineralogical crystallography and the relative simplicity of fabricating oxide specimens. However, diversification beyond oxides offers exciting opportunities to identify and develop new materials perhaps better suited for certain applications. Aluminum nitride (and recently, its Sc-modified derivative) is the only commercially integrated piezoelectric nitride in use today, although this is likely to change in the near future with increased use of high-throughput techniques for materials discovery and development. This review covers modern methods—both computational and experimental—that have been developed to explore chemical space for new materials with targeted characteristics. Here, the authors focus on the application of computational and high-throughput experimental approaches to discovering and optimizing piezoelectric nitride materials. While the focus of this review is on the search for and development of new piezoelectric nitrides, most of the research approaches discussed in this article are both chemistry- and application-agnostic.