Public Release:  By their powers combined

Magnetoelectric materials hold the key to new computer memories

DOE/Argonne National Laboratory

ARGONNE, Ill. - Although scientists have been aware that magnetism and electricity are two sides of the same proverbial coin for almost 150 years, researchers are still trying to find new ways to use a material's electric behavior to influence its magnetic behavior, or vice versa.

Thanks to new research by an international team of researchers led by the U.S. Department of Energy's Argonne National Laboratory, physicists have developed new methods for controlling magnetic order in a particular class of materials known as "magnetoelectrics."


"Electricity and magnetism are intrinsically coupled - they're the same entity," said Philip Ryan, a physicist at Argonne's Advanced Photon Source. "Our research is designed to accentuate the coupling between the electric and magnetic parameters by subtly altering the structure of the material."


"The europium and the titanium combine to control the two properties," Ryan said. "The position of the titanium influences the electric behavior, while the europium generates the magnetic nature. There's a shared responsibility for the system's coupling behavior."


Potential magnetic and electric memories each have a distinct appeal to researchers. Electric memories - like the kind used into today's electronics - allow computers to write data fast and very efficiently. Magnetic memories are less energy efficient, but are extraordinarily robust.

"The more we learn about magnetoelectrics, the more we open up this space that gives us the best of both worlds," Ryan said.


"Instead of having just a '0' or a '1,' you could have a broader range of different values," Ryan said. "A lot of people are looking into what that kind of logic would look like."

A paper based on the research, "Reversible control of magnetic interactions by electric field in a single-phase material," was published in Nature Communications.


A portion of the research was funded by the U.S. Department of Energy's Office of Science. The research was also supported by the National Science Foundation, and the EPSRC (United Kingdom-funded beamline at the European Synchrotron Radiation Facility.)


