A team of researchers at the City College of New York (CCNY) claims to have discovered new complex oxides that have both magnetic and ferroelectric properties.
That opens the possibility of producing advanced memory devices that can use both properties.
The CCNY team have made a mineral that isn’t found in nature and is based on barium, titanium and manganese, according to lead researcher Professor Stephen O’Brien.
In combination with other teams from other universities they observed magnetic and ferroelectric properties in a crystal group that’s called “multiferroic”.
O’Brien thinks: “The Holy Grail in this field is the combination of both magnetic and ferroelectric elements at room temperature with a sufficient magnitude of interaction.”
He said using these properties could displace flash memory or lead to small memory devices that have “massive” storage capacities.
The quest is for the ultimate memory device, it seems.
