Water and Nanoelectronics Will Mix to Create Ultra-Dense Memory Storage Devices

Excessive moisture can typically wreak havoc on electronic devices, but now researchers have demonstrated that a little water can help create ultra-dense storage systems for computers and electronics.


A team of experimentalists and theorists at the University of Pennsylvania, Drexel University and Harvard University has proposed a new and surprisingly effective means of stabilizing and controlling ferroelectricity in nanostructures: terminating their surfaces with fragments of water. Ferroelectrics are technologically important “smart” materials for many applications because they have local dipoles, which can switch up and down to encode and store information. The team’s work is reported in the April issue of Nano Letters.

“It is astonishing to see that a single wire of even a few atoms across can act as a stable and switchable dipole memory element,” Jonathan Spanier, assistant professor of materials science and engineering at Drexel, said.

Spanier and his colleagues successfully demonstrated the benefits of using water to stabilize memory bits in segments of oxide nanowires that are only about 3 billionths of a meter wide.

“We have been interested in how water sticks to oxides,” Alexie Kolpak, Penn graduate student in theoretical physical chemistry, said. “We are particularly excited that water is the key ingredient in making these wires ’remember’ their state.”

In this investigation, led by Hongkun Park of Harvard and Andrew Rappe of Penn, the researchers probed oxide nanowires individually to characterize the size-dependence of ferroelectricity and performed calculations and experiments to validate the presence of molecules on oxide surfaces and detail their important role in nanoscale ferroelectricity. Significantly, these results show that ferroelectric surfaces with water fragments or other molecules can stabilize ferroelectricity in smaller structures than previously thought.

Though a scheme for the dense arrangement and addressing of these nanowires remains to be developed, such an approach would enable a storage density of more than 100,000 terabits per cubic centimeter. If this memory density can be realized commercially, a device the size of an iPod nano could hold enough MP3 music to play for 300,000 years without repeating a song or enough DVD quality video to play movies for 10,000 years without repetition.

This work is supported by the National Science Foundation, the Packard Foundation, the Dreyfus Foundation, the Office of Naval Research, the Center for Piezoelectric Design and the Army Research Office.

Media Contact

Greg Lester EurekAlert!

More Information:

http://www.upenn.edu

All latest news from the category: Physics and Astronomy

This area deals with the fundamental laws and building blocks of nature and how they interact, the properties and the behavior of matter, and research into space and time and their structures.

innovations-report provides in-depth reports and articles on subjects such as astrophysics, laser technologies, nuclear, quantum, particle and solid-state physics, nanotechnologies, planetary research and findings (Mars, Venus) and developments related to the Hubble Telescope.

Back to home

Comments (0)

Write a comment

Newest articles

Lighting up the future

New multidisciplinary research from the University of St Andrews could lead to more efficient televisions, computer screens and lighting. Researchers at the Organic Semiconductor Centre in the School of Physics and…

Researchers crack sugarcane’s complex genetic code

Sweet success: Scientists created a highly accurate reference genome for one of the most important modern crops and found a rare example of how genes confer disease resistance in plants….

Evolution of the most powerful ocean current on Earth

The Antarctic Circumpolar Current plays an important part in global overturning circulation, the exchange of heat and CO2 between the ocean and atmosphere, and the stability of Antarctica’s ice sheets….

Partners & Sponsors