Rare electronics state with a five layer Graphene Sandwich
A newly discovered type of electronic behavior could help with packing more data into magnetic memory devices
Graphene is always surprising! When stacked in five layers, in a rhombohedral (think of five chicken-wire fences, stacked and slightly shifted such that, viewed from the top, the structure would resemble a pattern of diamonds.) pattern, graphene takes on a very rare, “multiferroic” state, in which the material exhibits both unconventional magnetism and an exotic type of electronic behavior, which the team has coined ferro-valleytricity.
“Graphene is a fascinating material,” says team leader Long Ju, assistant professor of physics at MIT. “Every layer you add gives you essentially a new material. And now this is the first time we see ferro-valleytricity, and unconventional magnetism, in five layers of graphene. But we don’t see this property in one, two, three, or four layers.”
The discovery could help engineers design ultra-low-power, high-capacity data storage devices for classical and quantum computers.
“Having multiferroic properties in one material means that, if it could save energy and time to write a magnetic hard drive, you could also store double the amount of information compared to conventional devices,” Ju says.
His team reports their discovery in Nature.
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