Technion team's breakthrough research vacates single oxygen atoms
A study, which was published in the peer-reviewed scientific journal 'ACS Nano,' shares findings that are a potential breakthrough in the development of ferroelectric materials.
Faculty of Materials Science and Engineering at Technion University.
(photo credit: Wikimedia Commons)
A research team at Israel’s Technion
– Israel Institute of Technology – the preeminent research institution
in Israel – has succeeded in changing a material’s electrical properties
by vacating a single oxygen atom from the original structure.
The study, which was published in the peer-reviewed scientific journal ACS Nano,
shares findings that are a potential breakthrough in the study and
development of ferroelectric materials. Ferroelectric materials, such as
barium titanate and Rochelle salt, are characterized by a strong
correlation between their atomic structure and electrical and mechanical
properties. They are critical to the development of electronic devices.
Researchers
used barium titanate, the atoms of which form a cubic-like lattice
structure, for the study. In ferroelectric materials, a unique
phenomenon occurs: titanium atoms draw away from oxygen atoms, as
titanium is positively charged and oxygen is negatively charged.
A cubic lattice has six faces, so the charged atoms move into one
of six possibilities. In different parts of the material, a large number
of neighboring atoms shift in the same direction, and polarization in
each such area – known as ferroelectric domains – is standard and
uniform. Traditional technologies are based on the electric field
created in those domains.
Ferroelectric materials side-by-side after removing oxygen atom. (credit: TECHNION)
In
recent years, however, a great deal of effort has been directed at
minimizing the device size and using the borders, or walls, between the
domains rather than the domains themselves.
The
research community has remained divided in opinion as to what happens
in the two-dimensional world of the domain walls: How is the border
between two domains with different electric polarization stabilized? Is
the polarization in domain walls different from that in the domains
themselves? Can the properties of the domain wall be controlled in a
localized manner?
While
ferroelectric materials are great at conducting electricity, the domain
walls form a two-dimensional object that is controllable at the will of
scientists. This phenomenon encompasses the potential to significantly
reduce energy consumption in data storage and data processing devices.
Researchers eventually succeeded in inducing through engineering an individual oxygen atom
vacancy and demonstrated that this action creates opposing dipoles and
greater electric symmetry – a unique topological structure called a
quadrupole.
The
findings demonstrated that engineering an oxygen atom vacancy has a
great impact on the electrical properties of the material – not only at
the atomic scale, but also at the scale that is relevant to electronic
devices, for example, in terms of electrical conductivity. The findings
will aid in reducing the energy consumption of electronic devices.
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