Researchers from the Max Planck Institute of Microstructure Physics and Forschungszentrum Jülich have noticed how dipoles, which harness data in a ferroelectric material, constantly spin and therefore could be arranged in circular patterns. The research paper has been released in the journal Science.
The team used a transmission electron microscopy featuring sharp contrast and designed by the Jülich team. The circular design could provide more information storage, along with rapid d reading and writing processes. Ferroelectrics can be written and read rapidly and provide more data storage. They could be used in working memories having several terabits per square inch density.
They store bits in which an electric field removes the negatively and positively charged atoms in relation to one another. This makes the unit cells a bit disrupted, causing a dipole. The dipole exists until an inverse polarisation field triggers the dipole or leads to depolarisation. Each bit is allotted to an area of the ferroelectrics memory, in which all dipoles exhibit equal orientation.
Chun-Lin Jia, a scientist working at the Forschungszentrum Jülich, said that the polarisation is retained under certain conditions even in nano-domains.
The ferroelectric material was developed at the Max Planck Institute. The material, called lead zirconate titanate (PZT), comprises titanium, zirconium, lead and oxygen. Knut Urban, Director of the Ernst Ruska Center for Microscopy and Spectroscopy with Electrons, and Chun-Lin have analyzed the PZT sample with a sensitive microscope. This device provides sharp contrast pictures of nanoscale details.
Source: http://www.mpg.de/