Piezoelectrics—materials that can change mechanical stress to electricity and back again—are everywhere in modern life: computer hard drives, loud speakers, medical ultrasound, sonar. Although piezoelectrics are a widely used technology, there are major gaps in our understanding of how they work.

Now researchers at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and Canada’s Simon Fraser University believe they’ve learned why one of the main classes of these materials, known as relaxors, behaves in distinctly different ways from the rest and exhibit the largest piezoelectric effect. And the discovery comes in the shape of a butterfly.

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