Tertullian, illustrating the sacrilegious nature of pagan religion, records that in an auditorium he saw a person being burned to death in the role of Hercules and another being castrated as Attis; both of these examples he adduces to substantiate his assertion to his pagan audience that ‘criminals often adopt the roles of your deities’ (‘et ipsos deos vestros saepe noxii induunt’). The practice that Tertullian here deplores is the subject of this paper: the punishment of criminals in a formal public display involving role-play set in a dramatic context; the punishment is usually capital.
Dio devotes almost an entire chapter to the aquatic displays forming part of Titus' one hundred days of spectacles to celebrate the inauguration in A.D. 80 of the Flavian Amphitheatre (which he calls θέατϱον [ϰυνηγετιϰόν]). He is not without limitations as an historian; but when his testimony contains details which are difficult to explain, it is not to be dismissed out of hand.
Antiferroelectrics, which undergo a field‐induced phase transition to ferroelectric order that manifests as double‐hysteresis polarization switching, exhibit great potential for dielectric, electromechanical, and electrothermal applications. Compared to their ferroelectric cousins, however, considerably fewer efforts have been made to understand and control antiferroelectrics. Here, it is demonstrated that the polarization switching behavior of an antiferroelectric can be strongly influenced and effectively regulated by point defects. In films of the canonical antiferroelectric PbZrO3, decreasing oxygen pressure during deposition (and thus increasing adatom kinetic energy) causes unexpected “ferroelectric‐like” polarization switching although the films remain in the expected antiferroelectric orthorhombic phase. This “ferroelectric‐like” switching is correlated with the creation of bombardment‐induced point‐defect complexes which pin the antiferroelectric–ferroelectric phase boundaries, and thus effectively delay the phase transition under changing field. The effective pinning energy is extracted via temperature‐dependent switching‐kinetics studies. In turn, by controlling the concentration of defect complexes, the dielectric tunability of the PbZrO3 can be adjusted, including being able to convert between “positive” and “negative” tunability near zero field. This work reveals the important role and strong capability of defects to engineer antiferroelectrics for new performance and functionalities.
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