Data from: Converse flexoelectric two-dimensional MoS 2 actuator

However, their development has been limited, primarily because flexoelectric effects are negligible in bulk materials. At the nanoscale, the converse flexoelectric effect becomes much more promising, as the electric field gradient scales quadratically with decreasing material thickness.

Here, we report a converse flexoelectric actuator based on two-dimensional molybdenum disulfide. Under alternating current excitation near 20 kHz, the actuator exhibits resonant displacements up to ~45 nm, approximately two orders of magnitude larger than the thickness of the molybdenum disulfide active layer. This performance exceeds that of existing flexoelectric actuators by more than an order of magnitude when normalized by active layer thickness.