ORNL finding could help electronics industry enter...( Electronic devices of the future cou...),Health

Electronic devices of the future could be smaller, faster, more powerful and consume less energy because of a discovery by researchers at the Department of Energy's Oak Ridge National Laboratory.

The key to the finding, published in Science, involves a method to measure intrinsic conducting properties of ferroelectric materials, which for decades have held tremendous promise but have eluded experimental proof. Now, however, ORNL Wigner Fellow Peter Maksymovych and co-authors Stephen Jesse, Art Baddorf and Sergei Kalinin at the Center for Nanophase Materials Sciences believe they may be on a path that will see barriers tumble.

"For years, the challenge has been to develop a nanoscale material that can act as a switch to store binary information," Maksymovych said. "We are excited by our discovery and the prospect of finally being able to exploit the long-conjectured bi-stable electrical conductivity of ferroelectric materials.

"Harnessing this functionality will ultimately enable smart and ultra-dense memory technology."

In the paper, the authors have demonstrated for the first time a giant intrinsic electroresistance in conventional ferroelectric films, where flipping of the spontaneous polarization increased conductance by up to 50,000 percent. Ferroelectric materials can retain their electrostatic polarization and are used for piezoactuators, memory devices and RFID (radio-frequency identification) cards.

"It is as if we open a tiny door in the polar surface for electrons to enter," Maksymovych said. "The size of this door is less than one-millionth of an inch, and it is very likely taking only one-billionth of a second to open."

As the paper illustrates, the key distinction of ferroelectric memory switches is that they can be tuned through thermodynamic properties of ferroelectrics.

"Among other benefits, we can use the tunability to minimize the power needed for recording and reading inf
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