{"id":239935,"date":"2026-06-29T19:03:17","date_gmt":"2026-06-30T00:03:17","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2026\/06\/the-hidden-structure-behind-a-widely-used-class-of-materials"},"modified":"2026-06-29T19:03:17","modified_gmt":"2026-06-30T00:03:17","slug":"the-hidden-structure-behind-a-widely-used-class-of-materials","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2026\/06\/the-hidden-structure-behind-a-widely-used-class-of-materials","title":{"rendered":"The hidden structure behind a widely used class of materials"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a class=\"aligncenter blog-photo\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/the-hidden-structure-behind-a-widely-used-class-of-materials2.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>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.<\/p>\n<p>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, <a href=\"http:\/\/doi.org\/10.1126\/science.ads6023\" target=\"_blank\">reported today in <em>Science<\/em><\/a>, provide a framework for refining models used to design next-generation computing, energy, and sensing devices.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cNow that we have a better understanding of exactly what\u2019s going on, we can better predict and engineer the properties we want materials to achieve,\u201d says corresponding author James LeBeau, MIT\u2019s Kyocera Professor of Materials Science and Engineering. \u201cThe research community is still developing methods to engineer these materials, but in order to predict the properties those materials will have, you have to know if your model is right.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>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 [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":732,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1523,1635],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-239935","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-computing","category-materials"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/239935","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/732"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=239935"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/239935\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=239935"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=239935"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=239935"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}