The photovoltaic effect of “ferroelectric” bananas [new study]

Building on the work of Prof. James F. Scott, FRS of the Cavendish Laboratory, Cambridge UK, who showed that :

“[…] ordinary bananas exhibit closed loops of switched charge versus applied voltage that are nearly identical to those misinterpreted as ferroelectric hysteresis loops in crystals.”
_{See: ‘Hysterical ferroelectric banana misinterpretations’, November, 2015)}

Muhammad Ismail and colleagues at Zhejiang Normal University, China, have now been able to demonstrate, for the first time, that ordinary bananas can not only be thought of as ferrorelectric, but also that they can exhibit a pseudo-photovoltaic response.

Their work involved illuminating banana skins fitted with sliver electrodes, and enabled the following conclusion :

“In summary, the pseudo-photovoltaic effect is found in bananas, which are neither a ferroelectric material nor photovoltaic material.”

See: Photovoltaic effect of “ferroelectric” bananas in EPL (Europhysics Letters), Volume 125, Number 4, March 2019.