Abstract:
Researchers from the U.S. Department of Energy's Argonne National Laboratory and Northern Illinois University have shown that very thin materials can still retain an electric polarization, opening the potential for a wide range of tiny devices. The researchers found that the ferroelectric phase – the ability to hold a switchable electric polarization – is stable for thicknesses as small as 1.2 nanometers, one-billionth of a meter, or a size several hundred thousand times smaller than the period at the end of this sentence.