REVELATION OF UNIQUE PROPERTY, APPLICATION POTENTIAL IN FERROELECTRIC MATERIAL
A finding by a group of physicists as well as other experts raises the bar in the research of ferroelectricity, a feature of some dielectric materials used for the high-tech applications. The results are published in the Nature Materials journal today.
Leading throughout the theory of physics by Sokrates Pantelides, University Distinguished Professor of Physics and Engineering at Vanderbilt, and also in experimentation by Nina Balke and Peter Maksymovych of the Oak Ridge National Laboratory Department of Energy, the team found an undiscovered property known as a quadruple potential well, that plays an important role in the process identified as ferroelectric switching — a cycle that is spent
Physicists have so far recognized only 2 wells as destinations for moving atoms, resulting in a binary record. But perhaps the quadruple potential well increases the number of alternatives in ferroelectric switching, providing extra incentives that could proceed to increasingly complex data storage and electronics operations and applications.
"As in a compass, a ferromagnetic needle line up with a magnetic field," Pantelides concluded. "A ferroelectric needle will have one positively charged end, one negatively charged end and interact with an electrical field rather than a magnetic field. As electrical fields trigger the atomic poles to change in a ferroelectric, the mechanism provides a basis for producing, in particular, electronic memory devices."
The group, including members of the Pantelides community at Vanderbilt and many experimentalists at ORNL and other institutions, conducted a variety of calculations simulations and tests to confirm the presence of the quadruple well, mainly driven by the complex layered structure of the material: ferroelectric copper indium thiophosphate (CuInP2S6) or CIPS. Core postdoctoral scholars are Sabine Neumayer at ORNL and John Brehm, Lei Tao and Andrew O'Hara at Vanderbilt.
