October 3-10, 2025, La Clusaz

The third Junior-FLAIR Summer School will be held from October 3-10, 2025, in the beautiful alpine village of La Clusaz at Chalet Giersch, France

European Ceramic Society Conference, August 31 – September 4, 2025

From August 31 to September 4, 2025, the European Ceramic Society Conference (ECerS 2025) brought more than 1400 participants from 47 countries to the Congress Center in Dresden, Germany. The conference, organized by the European Ceramic Society in cooperation with Fraunhofer IKTS and the German Ceramic Society (DKG), featured 15 symposia, several satellite meetings, and a wide range of additional events.

XPS Enables Determination of Defect Energy Levels

New publication

Continuous effort is focused on improving lead-free piezoelectric materials, including the piezoceramic (Ba,Ca)(Zr,Ti)O3. However, unwanted secondary phases may have unpredictable influence on the performance and decrease the reproducibility. In our latest study, we used in-situ X-ray diffraction and thermal analysis to investigate the solid-state phase formation sequence of (Ba,Ca)(Zr,Ti)O3.

Graz, August 13-18, 2025

Between August 13 and 18, 2025, over 500 leading scientists and engineers from the fields of ferroelectric, piezoelectric, and electroceramic materials, participated at the 2025 IEEE ISAF-ICE-ISIF-PFM conference in Graz.

At the E-MRS Spring Meeting 2025 in Strasbourg

FLAIRistas Present Latest Advances of the CRC

A large number of FLAIR members participated in the E-MRS Spring Meeting 2025, which took place in Strasbourg, France from May 26 to May 30. The team, together with Mercator Fellows Elizabeth Dickey (Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh) and Emre Erdem (Sabanci University, Istanbul), presented and thoroughly discussed their latest achievements with a broad international community of materials scientists focused on electroceramics. Most contributions were part of Symposium N: “Advanced Doping Strategies, Defect States, and Electronic Structure of Functional Oxides”, which was supported by FLAIR and organized by Anke Weidenkaff, Jurij Koruza, and Marc Widenmeyer. Additionally, FLAIR-related research was featured in other symposia, covering topics such as next-generation solar technologies, ferroic materials and heterostructures, solid-state ionics, anion-controlled inorganic materials and mixed-anion systems, as well as computational materials science.

New Publication

The article explores how to improve the hydrogen tolerance of perovskite-based oxygen transport membranes. The base material LCCF (La₀.₆Ca₀.₄Co₀.₂Fe₀.₈O₃-d) is already used in plasma-assisted CO₂ conversion but remains stable in hydrogen atmospheres at 600 °C for only about 25 hours.

New Publication

This tutorial-article explores two ways of looking at defects in solids. One perspective, called defect chemistry, treats them with chemical reaction rules: concentrations of defects change depending on the chemical environment, and everything must balance in terms of charge and atoms. The other perspective, defect physics, uses thermodynamics and quantum mechanics to calculate how much energy is needed to form a defect. This energy depends on both the position of the Fermi level and the chemical environment.