Call for crystal or piezoelectric facts!
Added 2026-02-22 03:53:43 +0000 UTCComments
Potential avenues of investigation: • Does the voltage produced depend on the type of crystal, the size of the crystal, the amount of force applied, or a combination of these factors? Could you strike one of those cavern-sized quartz crystals to produce a piezoelectric effect? • If you compress one piezoelectric crystal with another piezoelectric crystal, do both produce a charge? • The inner core of the Earth is theorized to be a single mostly-iron crystal. If a meteor struck the Earth with sufficient force to compress the inner core, would it produce electricity? 😜
Dan Engler
2026-02-24 01:58:38 +0000 UTCBiochemist here again (hi)! My favorite application for piezoelectric crystals is atomic force microscopy. Basically an extremely tiny and sharp point ("cantilever tip") is applied to a sample, which can tell you a variety of things: how stiff the sample is (by poking it with a known force), its molecular topology (by dragging the cantilever tip across it and recording the cantilever's deflection), how long a polymer chain is (by sticking one end of the polymer chain to the slide and the other to the cantilever tip and pulling upward until the resistance spikes, indicating that the polymer chain is taut), and a bunch more crazy and creative methods that always blow my mind. The whole system hinges on applying force to stacks of piezoelectric crystals to exploit the piezoelectric effect and applying current to them to exploit the reverse piezoelectric effect. Using crystals instead of motors enables resolution on the sub-nanometer scale, which is pretty close to being able to "see" individual atoms. This is a whole rabbit hole and I am not a physicist so I recommend double checking my understanding of the physics here but it's SO COOL. I use this technology in my research to test how the stiffness of molecules from connective tissue changes when I make biologically-relevant chemical modifications to them. Cells change their behavior in response to the stiffness of the connective tissue they sit on, often in ways that could promote the very disease that causes these molecules to become modified in the first place. The goal there is to identify whether these modifications could be a causative factor in accelerating disease progression.
Libby
2026-02-22 16:00:05 +0000 UTCThe two most common space groups (P(-1) and P21/c) account for about 60% of all known crystal structures. These are centrosymmetric and thus cannot be piezoelectric. Their symmetry prevents them from generating a dipole moment in response to deformation. In all, only 22% of crystals are non-centrosymmetric and able to be piezoelectric.
WellenInspektor
2026-02-22 07:44:14 +0000 UTCFive-fold symmetry cannot exist in crystal structures and instead leads to quasicrystals. Quasicrystals have long range order but are not periodic in three dimensional space. Penrose tiling is a two dimensional example of this phenomenon.
WellenInspektor
2026-02-22 07:31:27 +0000 UTCNot uncommon knowledge but Human bones contain Piezoelectric material. Unrelated but it’s a common research topic to convert heart beats into piezoelectricity to power implants. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S2211285521000392
Tony Cummings
2026-02-22 05:39:05 +0000 UTC
