Piezoelectricity in single crystalline BaTiO/sub 3/ nanowire

Related to the fundamental issue in materials science, the scale and dimensionality effect in piezoelectricity and ferroelectricity, we synthesize one dimensional single crystalline BaTiO/sub 3/ nanowires and study their piezoelectric and ferroelectric behavior under various experimental conditions. The synthesized BaTiO/sub 3/ nanowires have diameters ranging from 50 to 200 nm, and have lengths up to tens micrometers. They are determined to be single crystalline grown along the [100] direction. Piezoresponse force microscopy was used to study the converse piezoelectric effect in nanowire by measuring the produced strain under applied local electric field. Constant dc bias on the piezoelectric response of nanowire shows nonlinear behavior.