Novel Magnetic, Superconducting Material Opens New Possibilities in Electronics

[OKIsItJustMe]

https://news.slac.stanford.edu/press-release/novel-magnetic-superconducting-material-opens-new-possibilities-electronics

Novel Magnetic, Superconducting Material Opens New Possibilities in Electronics

September 4, 2011

Menlo Park, Calif. – Scientists have reached a crucial milestone that could lead to a new class of materials with useful electronic properties. In research reported in the Sept. 5 issue of Nature Physics, the team sandwiched two nonmagnetic insulators together and discovered a startling result: The layer where the two materials meet has both magnetic and superconducting regions – two properties that normally can’t co-exist.

Technologists have long hoped to find a way to engineer magnetism in this class of materials, called complex oxides, as a first step in developing a potential new form of computing memory for storage and processing.

The discovery, made by researchers at the Stanford Institute for Materials and Energy Science (SIMES), a joint institute of the Department of Energy’s SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory and Stanford University, opens “exciting possibilities for engineering new materials and studying the interplay of these normally incompatible states,” said Kathryn A. “Kam” Moler, the SLAC/Stanford researcher who led the imaging studies.

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In a commentary accompanying both papers, Columbia University physicist Andrew J. Millis, who was not involved in the research, wrote that the work could introduce a new class of materials with “interesting, controllable, novel and perhaps useful collective electronic properties.” While this goal is far off, he said, the new findings indicate that “the field has passed a crucial milestone.”

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http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/nphys2079

[SpoonFed]

1. Uh, this is in the wrong forum? n/t