Brookhaven lab finds the future in tiny crystals

Researchers at Brookhaven National Laboratory have discovered how to see the inner workings of tiny atomic crystals believed to be crucial for building smaller and faster computers.

For years, scientists have studied these particles and their uncanny knack for storing data, but they function on such an infinitesimal level that no one fully grasped how they work.

Using a combination of electricity, fluctuating temperature and a very powerful microscope, the Brookhaven scientists say they figured out how to watch the crystals function on the scale of about one trillionth of a meter. That's 20 million times smaller than a width of human hair.

"This kind of detail is just amazing -- for the first time ever we can actually see the positions of atoms," said Yimei Zhu, a physicist who co-authored an article on the research published last week in the journal Nature Materials.

The findings could someday spur a host of commercial products, allowing engineers to make smaller, faster and more energy-efficient computers for our homes, cars and pockets. That could mean everything from speeding up devices to deploy automotive air bags during a crash to eliminating the question of whether to delete all those memory-sucking videos from your last vacation.

"It could allow them to further push the limits for data storage," said Ganpati Ramanath, a professor of materials science and engineering at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.

The crystals are called ferroelectrics. What makes them unique is their ability to indefinitely hold electric polarity. Think of each crystal as having a switch that can be flipped to give it a positive or negative charge.

Engineers can set those switches with electric current. The position of each switch represents a zero or a one in a computer's binary code -- the basis for everything in our digital world.

Engineers have talked for decades about using ferroelectrics, but they never gained widespread use -- in part because no one could figure out how to make them hold enough information. But the Brookhaven researchers found the material could be split into tiny cubes -- 20 to 30 atoms tall -- which, if carefully spaced apart, could each hold its own zero or one. The result, they say, is the potential to squeeze data from five desktop computers onto one square-inch chip.