Achieving both high energy storage density and excellent thermal stability in lead-free multilayer ceramic capacitors (MLCCs) has long been a critical challenge for advanced electronic systems. To address this issue, we propose an innovative strategy to simultaneously improve both properties by constructing ordered heterogeneous interfaces through embedding parallel-aligned Al2O3 plates in 0.6SrTiO3-0.4Bi0.5Na0.5TiO3 (0.6ST-0.4BNT) lead-free ceramics. This approach effectively suppresses the charge carrier injection and transport, yielding an ultrahigh recoverable energy storage density of 16.0 J cm-3 with a giant breakdown strength of 1140 kV cm-1 in Al2O3 modified 0.6ST-0.4BNT based MLCCs, which outperforms most state-of-the-art dielectric ceramics. Furthermore, the MLCCs exhibit superior thermal stability with variation less than 3% across a broad temperature range of 20-160 °C. The overall superior performance underscores the potential of the ordered heterogeneous interface engineering in advancing the thermally stable high-density energy storage materials for next-generation MLCC applications.
He et al. (Mon,) studied this question.