Materials called relaxor ferroelectrics have been used for decades in technologies like ultrasounds, microphones, and sonar systems. Their unique properties come from their atomic structure, but that structure has stubbornly eluded direct measurement.

Now a team of researchers from MIT and elsewhere has directly characterized the three-dimensional atomic structure of a relaxor ferroelectric for the first time. The findings, reported in Science, provide a framework for refining models used to design next-generation computing, energy, and sensing devices.

“Now that we have a better understanding of exactly what’s going on, we can better predict and engineer the properties we want materials to achieve,” says corresponding author James LeBeau, MIT’s Kyocera Professor of Materials Science and Engineering.