Transparent high-performance piezoceramics through pressureless sintering

Piezoelectricity offers an electromechanical coupling that is widely utilized in transducer applications. There has been a consistent demand on transparent piezoelectric materials for optoelectric applications. Therefore, despite the inherent tradeoff between transparency and piezoelectricity, numerous strategies have been explored to develop transparent piezoelectric materials. Nonetheless, the most transparent piezoelectric materials developed to date are either single crystals or materials that achieve transparency via hot-press sintering, limiting their industrial applicability. Therefore, we introduce a novel piezoelectric material that ensures transparency through codoping and pressureless sintering of polycrystalline ceramics. In this study, we employed a compositional optimization approach to enhance the synergistic effect between the transparency and piezoelectricity of Pb(Mg1/3Nb2/3)O₃–0.29PbTiO₃ (PMN–0.29PT) ceramics. By utilizing the tape casting process for mass production and large-area manufacturing, ourPb0.913La0.0145Sm0.0145(Mg1/3Nb2/3)0.71Ti0.29O₃ (TP2.9) ceramics exhibited over 60% transparency and a large piezoelectric coefficient of 1104 pC/N. This material holds considerable promise for a wide range of industrial applications in both optical and electronic domains.