Piezo-, Pyro-, and Ferroelectricity in Biological Materials

Abstract

The physical properties of all the materials are well known to be determined by their symmetry. The lower the symmetry, the richer the palette of material physical properties. On the other hand, the lower is the symmetry of a system, the more ordered it is. Certainly, living organic materials are highly ordered, and one may expect properties characteristic for low-symmetry materials, such as, for example, piezoelectric and pyroelectric effects. People began to be interested in this problem very long ago. Pasteur was probably the first to suggest over 100 years ago that biological systems have chiralic dissymmetric properties and that these properties are important for the functioning of the biological systems. Much later, researchers began to study piezolectric, pyroelectric, and ferroelectric properties of biological materials.