Physicists at the US Department of Energy's Argonne National Laboratory may have found the materials making the next generation of memory-- "magnetoelectrics" with linked magnetic and electric properties.
Magnetoelectric materials allow one to control magnetic behaviours via the application of electrical current, or vice versa. As physicist Philip Ryan puts it "electricity and magnetism are intrinsically coupled-– they’re the same entity. Our research is designed to accentuate the coupling between the electric and magnetic parameters by subtly altering the structure of the material."
The team at Argonne uses EuTiO3 (europium-titanium oxide), a compound whose atomic structure has a titanium atom inside an atomic "cage" of europium and oxygen (see picture). Compressing the cage (via thin EuTiO3 film) and applying voltage shifts the titanium, electrically polarising the compound and essentially changing the magnetic order of the material.
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