SCIENTISTS have discovered a way to simplify how electronic devices use those electrons — using a material that can serve dual roles in electronics, where historically multiple materials have been necessary.
Electronics rule the world, but electrons rule the electronics.
A research team at The Ohio State University has discovered a way to simplify how electronic devices use those electrons—using a material that can serve dual roles in electronics, where historically multiple materials have been necessary.
The team published its findings last month in the journal Nature Materials.
“We have essentially found a dual-personality material,” said Joseph Heremans, co-author of the study, professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering and Ohio Eminent Scholar in Nanotechnology at Ohio State. “It is a concept that did not exist before.”
Their findings could mean a revamp of the way engineers create all different kinds of electronic devices. This includes everything from solar cells, to the light-emitting diodes in your television, to the transistors in your laptop, and to the light sensors in your smartphone camera.
Those devices are the building blocks of electricity: Each electron has a negative charge and can radiate or absorb energy depending on how it is manipulated. Holes—essentially, the absence of an electron—have a positive charge. Electronic devices work by moving electrons and holes—essentially conducting electricity.
But the Ohio State researchers found a material —- NaSn2As2, a crystal that can be both electron-holder and hole-holder —- potentially eliminating the need for multiple layers.
The finding could simplify our electronics, perhaps creating more efficient systems that operate more quickly and break down less often.
The researchers named this dual-ability phenomenon “goniopolarity.” They believe the material functions this way because of its unique electronic structure, and say it is probable that other layered materials could exhibit this property.
The researchers made the discovery almost by accident. A graduate student researcher in Heremans’ lab, Bin He, was measuring the properties of the crystal when he noticed that the material behaved sometimes like an electron-holder and sometimes like a hole-holder—something that, at that point, science thought was impossible. He thought perhaps he had made an error, ran the experiment again and again, and got the same result. —Internet
