{"id":11315,"date":"2016-10-21T08:26:12","date_gmt":"2016-10-21T08:26:12","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.kurzweilai.net\/?p=288092"},"modified":"2016-10-26T01:06:34","modified_gmt":"2016-10-26T01:06:34","slug":"atomic-sandwich-computing-material-uses-100-times-less-energy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/hoo.central12.com\/fugic\/2016\/10\/21\/atomic-sandwich-computing-material-uses-100-times-less-energy\/","title":{"rendered":"‘Atomic sandwich’ computing material uses 100 times less energy"},"content":{"rendered":"
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New magnetoelectric multiferroic material operates at 100 times lower power (credit: Julia A. Mundy\/Nature)<\/p><\/div>\n

Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory scientists have developed a new “magnetoelectric multiferroic*” material that could lead to a new generation of computing devices with more computing power while consuming a fraction of the energy that today\u2019s electronics require.<\/p>\n

Electronics could be half of our total global energy consumption by 2030<\/strong><\/p>\n

“Electronics are the fastest-growing consumer of energy worldwide,\u201d said Ramamoorthy Ramesh, associate laboratory director for energy technologies at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.<\/p>\n

“Today, about five percent of our total global energy consumption is spent on electronics, and that\u2019s projected to grow to 40–50 percent by 2030 if we continue at the current pace and if there are no major advances in the field that lead to lower energy consumption.”<\/p>\n

Global or world energy consumption<\/a> is the total\u00a0energy\u00a0used by all of\u00a0human civilization. The U.S. Energy Information Administration<\/a> estimates that in 2013,\u00a0world energy consumption was\u00a0157,481 terawatt hours (TWh), mainly from polluting expendables — oil, coal, and natural gas.<\/p>\n

The new material, which combines electrical and magnetic properties at room temperature, could help reduce this consumption in the future.<\/p>\n

Room-temperature multiferroics<\/strong><\/p>\n

The newly developed material sandwiches together individual layers of atoms, producing a thin film with magnetic polarity that can be \u201cflipped\u201d from positive to negative or vice versa with small pulses of electricity.<\/p>\n

In the future, device makers could use this property to store digital 0\u2019s and 1\u2019s, the binary backbone that underpins computing devices.<\/p>\n

\u201cBefore this work, there was only one other room-temperature multiferroic whose magnetic properties could be controlled by electricity,\u201d said John Heron<\/a>, assistant professor in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering at the University of Michigan<\/a>, who worked on the material with researchers at Cornell University. \u201cThat electrical control is what excites electronics makers, so this is a huge step forward.\u201d<\/p>\n

100 times less power required<\/strong><\/p>\n

Room-temperature multiferroics are a hotly pursued goal in the electronics field because they require much less power to read and write data than today\u2019s semiconductor-based devices. In addition, they are nonvolatile (their data doesn\u2019t vanish when the power is shut off).<\/p>\n

Those properties could enable devices that require only brief pulses of electricity instead of the constant stream that\u2019s needed for current electronics, resulting in using an estimated 100 times less energy.<\/p>\n

To create the new material, the researchers started with thin, atomically precise films of hexagonal lutetium iron oxide (LuFeO3), a material known to be a robust ferroelectric, but not strongly magnetic. Lutetium iron oxide consists of alternating monolayers of lutetium oxide and iron oxide. They then used a technique called molecular-beam epitaxy <\/a>(which takes place in a high vacuum) to add one extra monolayer of iron oxide to every 10 atomic repeats of the single-single monolayer pattern.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe were essentially spray painting individual atoms of iron, lutetium and oxygen to achieve a new atomic structure that exhibits stronger magnetic properties,\u201d said Darrell Schlom, a materials science and engineering professor at Cornell and senior author of a paper on the work recently published in Nature.<\/p>\n

The result was a new material that combines a phenomenon in lutetium oxide called \u201cplanar rumpling\u201d with the magnetic properties of iron oxide to achieve multiferroic properties at room temperature.**<\/p>\n

While Heron believes a viable multiferroic device is likely several years off, the work puts the field closer to its goal of devices that continue the computing industry\u2019s speed improvements while consuming less power — replacing current silicon-based technology.<\/p>\n

The research was published in a paper in the Sept. 22 issue of Nature<\/em>. It was supported by the Department of Energy’s Office of Science.<\/p>\n

* The\u00a0magnetoelectric effect<\/a> is the phenomenon of inducing magnetic or electric polarization by applying an external electric or magnetic field. “Ferroics<\/a>” is the generic name given to the study of iron-based ferromagnets<\/a>,\u00a0ferroelectrics<\/a>, and\u00a0ferroelastics<\/a>. These materials exhibit large changes in physical characteristics that occur when\u00a0phase transitions<\/a> (such as paramagnetic, or temporary magnetism, to ferromagnetic, or permanent magnetism) take place around some critical temperature value.\u00a0Multiferroics<\/a>\u00a0exhibit more than one ferroic property simultaneously.<\/em><\/p>\n

** Heron explains that the lutetium exhibits atomic-level displacements called rumples. Visible under an electron microscope, the rumples enhance the magnetism in the material, allowing it to persist at room temperature. The rumples can be moved by applying an electric field, and are enough to nudge the magnetic field in the neighboring layer of iron oxide from positive to negative or vice versa, creating a material whose magnetic properties can be controlled with electricity — a \u201cmagnetoelectric multiferroic.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n

\n

Abstract of\u00a0Atomically engineered ferroic layers yield a room-temperature magnetoelectric multiferroic<\/em><\/h4>\n

Materials that exhibit simultaneous order in their electric and magnetic ground states hold promise for use in next-generation memory devices in which electric fields control magnetism. Such materials are exceedingly rare, however, owing to competing requirements for displacive ferroelectricity and magnetism. Despite the recent identification of several new multiferroic materials and magnetoelectric coupling mechanisms, known single-phase multiferroics remain limited by antiferromagnetic or weak ferromagnetic alignments, by a lack of coupling between the order parameters, or by having properties that emerge only well below room temperature, precluding device applications2<\/a><\/sup>. Here we present a methodology for constructing single-phase multiferroic materials in which ferroelectricity and strong magnetic ordering are coupled near room temperature. Starting with hexagonal LuFeO3<\/sub>\u2014the geometric ferroelectric with the greatest known planar rumpling\u2014we introduce individual monolayers of FeO during growth to construct formula-unit-thick syntactic layers of ferrimagnetic LuFe2<\/sub>O4<\/sub>\u00a0within the LuFeO3<\/sub> matrix, that is, (LuFeO3<\/sub>)m<\/em><\/sub>\/(LuFe2<\/sub>O4<\/sub>)1<\/sub> superlattices. The severe rumpling imposed by the neighbouring LuFeO3<\/sub> drives the ferrimagnetic LuFe2<\/sub>O4<\/sub> into a simultaneously ferroelectric state, while also reducing the LuFe2<\/sub>O4<\/sub> spin frustration. This increases the magnetic transition temperature substantially\u2014from 240 kelvin for LuFe2<\/sub>O4<\/sub>to 281 kelvin for (LuFeO3<\/sub>)9<\/sub>\/(LuFe2<\/sub>O4<\/sub>)1<\/sub>. Moreover, the ferroelectric order couples to the ferrimagnetism, enabling direct electric-field control of magnetism at 200 kelvin. Our results demonstrate a design methodology for creating higher-temperature magnetoelectric multiferroics by exploiting a combination of geometric frustration, lattice distortions and epitaxial engineering.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory scientists have developed a new “magnetoelectric multiferroic*” material that could lead to a new generation of computing devices with more computing power while consuming a fraction of the energy that today’s electronics require. Electronics could be half of our total global energy consumption by 2030 “Electronics are the fastest-growing consumer of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":13,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[48,55,43],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-11315","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-electronics","category-nanotechmaterials-science","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/hoo.central12.com\/fugic\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11315"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/hoo.central12.com\/fugic\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/hoo.central12.com\/fugic\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hoo.central12.com\/fugic\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/13"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hoo.central12.com\/fugic\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=11315"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/hoo.central12.com\/fugic\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11315\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":11381,"href":"https:\/\/hoo.central12.com\/fugic\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11315\/revisions\/11381"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/hoo.central12.com\/fugic\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11315"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hoo.central12.com\/fugic\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11315"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hoo.central12.com\/fugic\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=11315"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}