The 6th International Workshop on Relaxor Ferroelectrics (IWRF-2018) was held on July 17–21, 2018 in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. IWRF-2018 is a part of a series of international conferences on the named theme. As a recent and successful series in the ferroic materials community, the IWRFs are devoted to in-depth discussions on basic and applied aspects of phenomena originating from chemical order/disorder, structural inhomogeneity in condensed matters which could results in extraordinary properties useful for a wide range of future technological applications such as the Internet of Things. The previous five events of IWRFs were held in Xi'an, China (2011), Schloss Edesheim, Germany (2012), St. Petersburg, Russia (2013), Prague, Czech Republic (2014), Matsue, Japan (2016), respectively.
Relaxor ferroelectrics form an important class of functional materials, which includes the piezoelectrics (which convert mechanical energy into electrical energy, and vice versa), ferroelectrics (with switchable remnant polarization) and magnetoelectrics (with interacting polarization and magnetization). These materials are useful in a vast range of industrial and commercial applications in energy storage, environmental sensing and heath monitoring, e.g. nonvolatile random-access memory devices in future computers, ‘smart’ sensors and actuators for active control of vibration or noise, high-resolution ultrasonic probes for more accurate medical imaging, diagnosing and treatment, micro-electromechanical systems (MEMS), and electromechanical transducers for bio-sensing or energy harvesting. Central to relaxor ferroelectrics are chemical order/disorder and structural inhomogeneities on micro- to nano-scopic scale, which play a crucial role in the development of the macroscopic properties of this class of functional materials. However, the complex structures and microscopic mechanisms of the intricate relaxor ferroelectrics are still poorly understood.
IWRF-2018 provided a forum to present and discuss the state-of-the-art developments in relaxor ferroelectrics and related materials, with emphasis on the analysis, theory and modeling, and interpretations of the relaxor ferroelectricity and related phenomena, in order to provide a better understanding of the relationship between the nano-structures and macroscopic properties of relaxors, and to design and synthesize novel relaxor ferroelectric materials of high-performance for technological applications.
Ninety scientists from fifteen countries, i.e., Australia, Belgium, Canada, China, Czech Republic, France, Germany, Japan, Korea, Lithuania, Poland, Singapore, Slovenia, the United Kingdom, and the United States, participated in the workshop.
The international advisory committee (IAC) of IWRFs met during the workshop and elected several new members. The current IAC members include Juras Banys (Lithuania), Andrew Bell (UK), Annette Bussmann-Holder (Germany), Jan Dec (Poland), Takeshi Egami (USA), Peter Gehring (USA), Jiri Hlinka (Czech Republic), Mario Maglione (France), Kenji Ohwada (Japan), Sergei Vakhrushev (Russia), Xiaoyong Wei (China) and Zuo-Guang Ye (Canada). It was also decided that the next International Workshop on Relaxor Ferroelectrics (IWRF-2020) will be held on August 9–14, 2020 in Vilnius, Lithuania, with Professor Juras Banys serving as the Conference Chair.
This volume of Ferroelectrics includes select manuscripts that were presented at the IWRF-2018 and a few others will be published in future regular issues of the journal.
Donghua University, China
Alexei A. Bokov
Simon Fraser University, Canada
Zuo-Guang Ye
Simon Fraser University, Canada