Memory Devices tagged posts

A chemical design strategy for creating artificial multiferroics using oxide nanosheets. Credit: NIMS

Multiferroics are expected to play a vital role in the development of next-generation multifunctional electronic devices. The design of new multiferroics, or materials that display both ferroelectricity and ferromagnetism, is of fundamental importance for new electronic technologies. However, the co-existence of ferroelectricity and magnetic order at room temperature in single compounds is rare, and heterostructures with such multiferroic properties have only been made with complex techniques (such as pulsed-laser deposition and molecular beam epitaxy).

Seeking to develop room-temperature multiferroics, the research group utilized a new chemical design for artificial multiferroic thin film...

The newly synthesized crystal is ferroelectric above room temperature (a-b, e-f) and turns into “plastic phase”, meaning highly deformable, at higher temperature (a to c). The electric polarity of each molecule can be aligned in one direction by applying electric field as it cools (c to e). Credit: Harada J. et al., July 11, 2016, Nature Chemistry, DOI: 10.1038/NCHEM.2567; image is copyrighted

A novel ferroelectric plastic crystal could accelerate the development of more flexible, cost-efficient and less toxic ferroelectrics than those currently in use. Applying an electric field to some materials causes their atoms to “switch” their electric polarization from one direction to another, making one side of the material positive and the other negative...