title: Progress in piezotronics and piezo-phototronics.
abstract: The fundamental principle of piezotronics and piezo-phototronics were introduced by Wang in 2007 and 2010, respectively. Due to the polarization of ions in a crystal that has non-central symmetry in materials such as the wurtzite structured ZnO, GaN and InN, a piezoelectric potential (piezopotential) is created in the crystal by applying a stress. Owing to the simultaneous possession of piezoelectricity and semiconductor properties, the piezopotential created in the crystal has a strong effect on the carrier transport at the interface/junction. Piezotronics is about the devices fabricated using the piezopotential as a "gate" voltage to tune/control charge carrier transport at a contact or junction. The piezo-phototronic effect is to use the piezopotential to control the carrier generation, transport, separation and/or recombination for improving the performance of optoelectronic devices, such as photon detector, solar cell and LED. This manuscript reviews the updated progress in the two new fields. A perspective is given about their potential applications in sensors, human-silicon technology interfacing, MEMS, nanorobotics and energy sciences.
authors.affiliation: School of Material Science and Engineering, Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, 30332-0245, USA. zlwang@gatech.edu
authors.forename: Zhong Lin
authors.initials: ZL
authors.lastname: Wang
mesh_terms: D011211:Electric Power Supplies; D004563:Electrochemistry; D004581:Electronics / Q000379:methods*; D006801:Humans; D055096:Optical Devices; D012993:Solar Energy; D014173:Transistors, Electronic