Publications by Kaitlin Marie Howell

Flexoelectricity in amorphous hafnium oxide (HfO2)

Luis Guillermo Villanueva Torrijo, Kaitlin Marie Howell, Daniel Moreno Garcia

Flexoelectricity, inherent in all materials, offers a promising alternative to piezoelectricity for nanoscale actuation and sensing. However, its widespread application faces significant challenges: differentiating flexoelectric effects from those of piezo ...

2024

Dielectric Actuation Techniques at the Nanoscale: Piezoelectricity and Flexoelectricity

Kaitlin Marie Howell

Micro- and nanoelectromechanical systems (MEMS/NEMS) have long shown their potential to disrupt the established technologies. Over the past 15 years, MEMS have become fundamental components in filters, accelerometers, gyroscopes and gas sensors. MEMS are n ...

EPFL2019

Effect of AlN seed layer on crystallographic characterization of piezoelectric AlN

Paul Muralt, Luis Guillermo Villanueva Torrijo, Annalisa De Pastina, Ramin Matloub Aghdam, Kaitlin Marie Howell, Waqas Bashir

Ultrathin aluminum nitride (AlN) films are of great interest for integration into nanoelectromechanical systems for actuation and sensing. Given the direct relationship between crystallographic texture and piezoelectric (PZE) response, x-ray diffraction ha ...

2019

Piezoelectric Nanoelectromechanical Systems

Luis Guillermo Villanueva Torrijo, Annalisa De Pastina, Tom Larsen, Andrea Lozzi, Kaitlin Marie Howell, Muhammad Faizan

In this paper we describe five different transduction techniques for the motion of NEMS resonators. We describe how these techniques differ from those used for MEMS and how centrosymmetric or amorphous materials can be used to fabricate NEMS. ...

2017