Beyond Silicon: Transistors, No Semiconductors

Beyond Silicon: Transistors, No Semiconductors

  11:59:00 PM    Science Lover

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For decades, electronic devices have been getting smaller, and smaller, and smaller. It's now possible -- even routine -- to place millions of transistors on a single silicon chip.

Electrons flash across a series of gold quantum dots on boron 
nitride nanotubes. Michigan Tech scientists made the quantum
-tunneling device, which acts like a transistor at room 
temperature, without using semiconducting materials. 
(Credit: Yoke Khin Yap graphic)

But transistors based on semiconductors can only get so small. "At the rate the current technology is progressing, in 10 or 20 years, they won't be able to get any smaller," said physicist Yoke Khin Yap of Michigan Technological University. "Also, semiconductors have another disadvantage: they waste a lot of energy in the form of heat."

Scientists have experimented with different materials and designs for transistors to address these issues, always using semiconductors like silicon. Back in 2007, Yap wanted to try something different that might open the door to a new age of electronics.

"The idea was to make a transistor using a nanoscale insulator with nanoscale metals on top," he said. "In principle, you could get a piece of plastic and spread a handful of metal powders on top to make the devices, if you do it right. But we were trying to create it in nanoscale, so we chose a nanoscale insulator, boron nitride nanotubes, or BNNTs for the substrate."

Yap's team had figured out how to make virtual carpets of BNNTs,which happen to be insulators and thus highly resistant to electrical charge. Using lasers, the team then placed quantum dots (QDs) of gold as small as three nanometers across on the tops of the BNNTs, forming QDs-BNNTs. BNNTs are the perfect substrates for these quantum dots due to their small, controllable, and uniform diameters, as well as their insulating nature. BNNTs confine the size of the dots that can be deposited.

In collaboration with scientists at Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL), they fired up electrodes on both ends of the QDs-BNNTs at room temperature, and something interesting happened. Electrons jumped very precisely from gold dot to gold dot, a phenomenon known as quantum tunneling.

"Imagine that the nanotubes are a river, with an electrode on each bank. Now imagine some very tiny stepping stones across the river," said Yap. "The electrons hopped between the gold stepping stones. The stones are so small, you can only get one electron on the stone at a time. Every electron is passing the same way, so the device is always stable."

Yap's team had made a transistor without a semiconductor. When sufficient voltage was applied, it switched to a conducting state. When the voltage was low or turned off, it reverted to its natural state as an insulator.

Furthermore, there was no "leakage": no electrons from the gold dots escaped into the insulating BNNTs, thus keeping the tunneling channel cool. In contrast, silicon is subject to leakage, which wastes energy in electronic devices and generates a lot of heat.

Other people have made transistors that exploit quantum tunneling, says Michigan Tech physicist John Jaszczak, who has developed the theoretical framework for Yap's experimental research. However, those tunneling devices have only worked in conditions that would discourage the typical cellphone user.

"They only operate at liquid-helium temperatures," said Jaszczak.

The secret to Yap's gold-and-nanotube device is its submicroscopic size: one micron long and about 20 nanometers wide. "The gold islands have to be on the order of nanometers across to control the electrons at room temperature," Jaszczak said. "If they are too big, too many electrons can flow." In this case, smaller is truly better: "Working with nanotubes and quantum dots gets you to the scale you want for electronic devices."

"Theoretically, these tunneling channels can be miniaturized into virtually zero dimension when the distance between electrodes is reduced to a small fraction of a micron," said Yap.

Yap has filed for a full international patent on the technology.

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New Light On Possible 'Fifth Force of Nature'

New Light On Possible 'Fifth Force of Nature'

  7:52:00 PM    Science Lover

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In a breakthrough for the field of particle physics, Professor of Physics Larry Hunter and colleagues at Amherst College and The University of Texas at Austin have established new limits on what scientists call "long-range spin-spin interactions" between atomic particles. These interactions have been proposed by theoretical physicists but have not yet been seen. Their observation would constitute the discovery of a "fifth force of nature" (in addition to the four known fundamental forces: gravity, weak, strong and electromagnetic) and would suggest the existence of new particles, beyond those presently described by the Standard Model of particle physics.

This picture depicts the long-range spin-spin interaction (blue wavy lines) in which the spin-sensitive detector on Earth’s surface interacts with geoelectrons (red dots) deep in Earth’s mantle. The arrows on the geoelectrons indicate their spin orientations, opposite that of Earth’s magnetic field lines (white arcs). (Credit: Illustration: Marc Airhart (University of Texas at Austin) and Steve Jacobsen (Northwestern University).)

The new limits were established by considering the interaction between the spins of laboratory fermions (electrons, neutrons and protons) and the spins of the electrons within Earth. To make this study possible, the authors created the first comprehensive map of electron polarization within Earth induced by the planet's geomagnetic field.

Hunter -- along with emeritus Amherst physics professor Joel Gordon; postdoctoral fellow Stephen Peck; student researcher Daniel Ang '15; and Jung-Fu "Afu" Lin, associate professor of geosciences at UT Austin -- co-authored a paper about their work that appears in this week's issue of the journal Science. The highly interdisciplinary research relies on geophysics, atomic physics, particle physics, mineral physics, solid-state physics and nuclear physics to reach its conclusions.

The paper describes how the team combined a model of Earth's interior with a precise map of the planet's geomagnetic field to produce a map of the magnitude and direction of electron spins throughout Earth. Their model was based in part on insights gained from Lin's studies of spin transitions at the high temperatures and pressures of Earth's interior.

Every fundamental particle (every electron, neutron and proton, to be specific), explained Hunter, has the intrinsic atomic property of "spin." Spin can be thought of as a vector -- an arrow that points in a particular direction. Like all matter, Earth and its mantle -- a thick geological layer sandwiched between the thin outer crust and the central core -- are made of atoms. The atoms are themselves made up of electrons, neutrons and protons that have spin. Earth's magnetic field causes some of the electrons in the mantle's minerals to become slightly spin-polarized, meaning the directions in which their spins point are no longer completely random, but have some net orientation.

Earlier experiments, including one in Hunter's laboratory, explored whether their laboratory spins prefer to point in a particular direction. "We know, for example, that a magnetic dipole has a lower energy when it is oriented parallel to the geomagnetic field and it lines up with this particular direction -- that is how a compass works," he explained. "Our experiments removed this magnetic interaction and looked to see if there might be some other interaction that would orient our experimental spins. One interpretation of this 'other' interaction is that it could be a long-range interaction between the spins in our apparatus, and the electron spins within the Earth, that have been aligned by the geomagnetic field. This is the long-range spin-spin interaction we are looking for."

So far, no experiment has been able to detect any such interaction. But in Hunter's paper, the researchers describe how they were able to infer that such so-called spin-spin forces, if they exist, must be incredibly weak -- as much as a million times weaker than the gravitational attraction between the particles. At this level, the experiments can constrain "torsion gravity" -- a proposed theoretical extension of Einstein's Theory of General Relativity. Given the high sensitivity of the technique Hunter and his team used, it may provide a useful path for future experiments that will refine the search for such a fifth force. If a long-range spin-spin force is found, it not only would revolutionize particle physics but might eventually provide geophysicists with a new tool that would allow them to directly study the spin-polarized electrons within Earth.

"If the long-range spin-spin interactions are discovered in future experiments, geoscientists can eventually use such information to reliably understand the geochemistry and geophysics of the planet's interior," said Lin.

Possible future discoveries aside, Hunter said that he was pleased that this particular project enabled him to work with Lin. "When I began investigating spin transitions in the mantle, all of the literature led to him," he explained. "I was thrilled that he was interested in the project and willing to sign on as a collaborator. He has been a good teacher and has had enormous patience with my ignorance about geophysics. It has been a very fruitful collaboration."

Lin had his own take: "The most rewarding and surprising thing about this project was realizing that particle physics could actually be used to study the deep Earth."

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Quantum Computers Move Closer to Reality, Thanks to Highly Enriched and Highly Purified Silicon

Quantum Computers Move Closer to Reality, Thanks to Highly Enriched and Highly Purified Silicon

  2:57:00 PM    Science Lover

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The quantum computer is a futuristic machine that could operate at speeds even more mind-boggling than the world's fastest super-computers.

SFU physicist Mike Thewalt and grad student Kamyar 
Saeedi with a sample of highly isotopically enriched silicon - 
its unique properties could advance quantum computing. 
(Credit: Image courtesy of Simon Fraser University)

Research involving physicist Mike Thewalt of Simon Fraser University offers a new step towards making quantum computing a reality, through the unique properties of highly enriched and highly purified silicon.

Quantum computers right now exist pretty much in physicists' concepts, and theoretical research. There are some basic quantum computers in existence, but nobody yet can build a truly practical one -- or really knows how.

Such computers will harness the powers of atoms and sub-atomic particles (ions, photons, electrons) to perform memory and processing tasks, thanks to strange sub-atomic properties.

What Thewalt and colleagues at Oxford University and in Germany have found is that their special silicon allows processes to take place and be observed in a solid state that scientists used to think required a near-perfect vacuum.

And, using this 28Si they have extended to three minutes -- from a matter of seconds -- the time in which scientists can manipulate, observe and measure the processes.

"It's by far a record in solid-state systems," Thewalt says. "If you'd asked people a few years ago if this was possible, they'd have said no. It opens new ways of using solid-state semi-conductors such as silicon as a base for quantum computing.

"You can start to do things that people thought you could only do in a vacuum. What we have found, and what wasn't anticipated, are the sharp spectral lines (optical qualities) in the 28Silicon we have been testing. It's so pure, and so perfect. There's no other material like it."

But the world is still a long way from practical quantum computers, he notes.

Quantum computing is a concept that challenges everything we know or understand about today's computers.

Your desktop or laptop computer processes "bits" of information. The bit is a fundamental unit of information, seen by your computer has having a value of either "1" or "0."

That last paragraph, when written in Word, contains 181 characters including spaces. In your home computer, that simple paragraph is processed as a string of some 1,448 "1"s and "0"s.

But in the quantum computer, the "quantum bit" (also known as a "qubit") can be both a "1" and a "0" -- and all values between 0 and 1 -- at the same time.

Says Thewalt: "A classical 1/0 bit can be thought of as a person being either at the North or South Pole, whereas a qubit can be anywhere on the surface of the globe -- its actual state is described by two parameters similar to latitude and longitude."

Make a practical quantum computer with enough qubits available and it could complete in minutes calculations that would take today's super-computers years, and your laptop perhaps millions of years.

The work by Thewalt and his fellow researchers opens up yet another avenue of research and application that may, in time, lead to practical breakthroughs in quantum computing.

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Important step in the next generation of computing

Important step in the next generation of computing

  11:56:00 PM    Science Lover

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Scientists have taken one step closer to the next generation of computers. Research from the Cavendish Laboratory, the University of Cambridge's Department of Physics, provides new insight into spintronics, which has been hailed as the successor to the transistor.

Progress in electronics has relied heavily on reducing the size of the transistor to create small, powerful computers. Now spintronics, hailed as the successor to the transistor, looks set to transform the field.

Spintronics, which exploits the electron’s tiny magnetic moment, or ‘spin’, could radically change computing due to its potential of high-speed, high-density and low-power consumption. The new research sheds light on how to make ‘spin’ more efficient.

For the past fifty years, progress in electronics has relied heavily on the downsizing of the transistor through the semiconductor industry in order to provide the technology for the small, powerful computers that are the basis of our modern information society. In a 1965 paper, Intel co-founder Gordon E. Moore described how the number of transistors that could be placed inexpensively on an integrated circuit had doubled every year between 1958 and 1965, predicting that the trend would continue for at least ten more years.

That prediction, now known as Moore’s Law, effectively described a trend that has continued ever since, but the end of that trend—the moment when transistors are as small as atoms, and cannot be shrunk any further—is expected as early as 2015. At the moment, researchers are seeking new concepts of electronics that sustain the growth of computing power.

Spintronics research attempts to develop a spin-based electronic technology that will replace the charge-based technology of semiconductors. Scientists have already begun to develop new spin-based electronics, beginning with the discovery in 1988 of giant magnetoresistance (GMR) effect. The discovery of GMR effect brought about a breakthrough in gigabyte hard disk drives and was also key in the development of portable electronic devices such as the iPod.

While conventional technology relies on harnessing the charge of electrons, the field of spintronics depends instead on the manipulation of electrons’ spin. One of the unique properties in spintronics is that spins can be transferred without the flow of electric charge currents. This is called “spin current” and unlike other concepts of harnessing electrons, the spin current can transfer information without generating heat in electric devices. The major remaining obstacle to a viable spin current technology is the difficulty of creating a volume of spin current large enough to support current and future electronic devices.



However, the new Cambridge researchers in close collaboration with Professor Sergej Demokritov group at the University of Muenster, Germany, have, in part, addressed this issue. In order to create enhanced spin currents, the researchers used the collective motion of spins called spin waves (the wave property of spins). By bringing spin waves into interaction, they have demonstrated a new, more efficient way of generating spin current.

Dr Hidekazu Kurebayashi, from the Microelectronics Group at the Cavendish Laboratory, said: “You can find lots of different waves in nature, and one of the fascinating things is that waves often interact with each other. Likewise, there are a number of different interactions in spin waves. Our idea was to use such spin wave interactions for generating efficient spin currents.”

According to their findings, one of the spin wave interactions (called three-magnon splitting) generates spin current ten times more efficiently than using pre-interacting spin-waves. Additionally, the findings link the two major research fields in spintronics, namely the spin current and the spin wave interaction.

Dr Kurebayashi added: “I am grateful for the collegial and supportive environment at the Cavendish which makes the flexibility I have been afforded in my postdoc research. This allows me freedom to pursue my interest in spintronics outside of my normal research. I feel that Cambridge is the place where you are able to explore your ideas in an intellectually stimulating atmosphere.”

The research was published on Sunday 03 July in the journal Nature Materials.

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Putting a new spin on computing

Putting a new spin on computing

  10:14:00 AM    Science Lover

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Physicists at the University of Arizona have achieved a breakthrough toward the development of a new breed of computing devices that can process data using less power.

Just like a magnet with a north and a south pole (left),
electrons are surrounded by a magnetic field (right).
This magnetic momentum, or spin, could be used to store
information in more efficient ways. Credit: Philippe Jacquod

In a recent publication in Physical Review Letters, physicists at the University of Arizona propose a way to translate the elusive magnetic spin of electrons into easily measurable electric signals. The finding is a key step in the development of computing based on spintronics, which doesn't rely on electron charge to digitize information.

Unlike conventional computing devices, which require electric charges to flow along a circuit, spintronics harnesses the magnetic properties of electrons rather than their electric charge to process and store information.

"Spintronics has the potential to overcome several shortcomings of conventional, charge-based computing. Microprocessors store information only as long as they are powered up, which is the reason computers take time to boot up and lose any data in their working memory if there is a loss of power," said Philippe Jacquod, an associate professor with joint appointments in the College of Optical Sciences and the department of physics at the College of Science, who published the research together with his postdoctoral assistant, Peter Stano.

"In addition, charge-based microprocessors are leaky, meaning they have to run an electric current all the time just to keep the data in their working memory at their right value," Jacquod added. "That's one reason why laptops get hot while they're working."



"Spintronics avoids this because it treats the electrons as tiny magnets that retain the information they store even when the device is powered down. That might save a lot of energy."

To understand the concept of spintronics, it helps to picture each electron as a tiny magnet, Jacquod explained.

"Every electron has a certain mass, a certain charge and a certain magnetic moment, or as we physicists call it, a spin," he said. "The electron is not physically spinning around, but it has a magnetic north pole and a magnetic south pole. Its spin depends on which pole is pointing up."

Current microprocessors digitize information into bits, or "zeroes" and "ones," determined by the absence or presence of electric charges. "Zero" means very few electronic charges are present; "one" means there are many of them. In spintronics, only the orientation of an electron's magnetic spin determines whether it counts as a zero or a one.

"You want as many magnetic units as possible, but you also want to be able to manipulate them to generate, transfer and exchange information, while making them as small as possible" Jacquod said.

Taking advantage of the magnetic moment of electrons for information processing requires converting their magnetic spin into an electric signal. This is commonly achieved using contacts consisting of common iron magnets or with large magnetic fields. However, iron magnets are too crude to work at the nanoscale of tomorrow's microprocessors, while large magnetic fields disturb the very currents they are supposed to measure.

"Controlling the spin of the electrons is very difficult because it responds very weakly to external magnetic fields," Jacquod explained. "In addition, it is very hard to localize magnetic fields. Both make it hard to miniaturize this technology."

"It would be much better if you could read out the spin by making an electric measurement instead of a magnetic measurement, because miniaturized electric circuits are already widely available," he added.

In their research paper, based on theoretical calculations controlled by numerical simulations, Jacquod and Stano propose a protocol using existing technology and requiring only small magnetic fields to measure the spin of electrons.

"We take advantage of a nanoscale structure known as a quantum point contact, which one can think of as the ultimate bottleneck for electrons," Jacquod explained. "As the electrons are flowing through the circuit, their motion through that bottleneck is constrained by quantum mechanics. Placing a small magnetic field around that constriction allows us to measure the spin of the electrons."

"We can read out the spin of the electrons based on how the current through the bottleneck changes as we vary the magnetic field around it. Looking at how the current changes tells us about the spin of the electrons."

"Our experience tells us that our protocol has a very good chance to work in practice because we have done similar calculations of other phenomena," Jacquod said. "That gives us the confidence in the reliability of these results."

In addition to being able to detect and manipulate the magnetic spin of the electrons, the work is a step forward in terms of quantifying it.

"We can measure the average spin of a flow of electrons passing through the bottleneck," Jacquod explained. "The electrons have different spins, but if there is an excess in one direction, for example ten percent more electrons with an upward spin, we can measure that rather precisely."

He said that up until now, researchers could only determine there was excess, but were not able to quantify it.

"Once you know how to produce the excess spin and know how to measure it, you could start thinking about doing basic computing tasks," he said, adding that in order to transform this work into applications, some distance has yet to be covered.

"We are hopeful that a fundamental stumbling block will very soon be removed from the spintronics roadmap," Stano added.

Spintronics could be a stepping stone for quantum computing, in which an electron not only encodes zero or one, but many intermediate states simultaneously. To achieve this, however, this research should be extended to deal with electrons one-by-one, a feat that has yet to be accomplished.

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World's first Content Addressable Memory stores data without using power

World's first Content Addressable Memory stores data without using power

  9:59:00 PM    Science Lover

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NEC Corporation and Tohoku University announced today the development of the world's first content addressable memory (CAM) that both maintains the same high operation speed and non-volatile operation as existing circuits when processing and storing data on a circuit while power is off.

NEC's new CAM is a part of spintronics logic integrated circuit technologies that utilize the negative properties of electrons together with the spin magnetic moment. The new CAM utilizes the vertical magnetization of vertical domain wall elements in reaction to magnetic substances in order to enable data that is processing within the CAM to be stored on a circuit without using power. This contrasts to conventional technologies that required data to be stored within memory. As a result, data can be saved on circuits even when power is cut from the CAM.

In recent years, the use of ICT equipment has steadily increased due to the widespread growth of cloud computing. Most existing equipment requires a short amount of time to get started and internal circuits remain active when the equipment is in standby mode. Therefore, the growing consumption of power by ICT equipment in standby mode has become a serious concern.

Use of the new CAM in combination with existing nonvolatile memory is related to greater non-volatility of CPU for electronics and other storage devices. Furthermore, use of this new CAM enables the development of electronics that start instantly and consume zero electricity while in standby mode.

Key features of these newly developed technologies:

• High-speed data retrieval

In order for CAM to be both nonvolatile and maintain a high speed, two spintronics devices, spinning in opposite directions to one another, were connected within the same cell. In terms of constructing the circuit, writing is done once by connecting two devices in a series using recently developed three pin particles that separate the current path into writing and reading.

This new process enables cells to become more compact since the number of writing switches per element is reduced by one. Moreover, the new CAM achieve the same level of high-speed data retrieval as current CMOS based CAM that feature 5ns and low power consumption of 9.4mW.

• Approximately half the circuit area in comparison to existing technologies
In addition to the vertical domain wall element can connect in series by separating the route of current into reading and writing, the newly developed CAM circuit technologies can reduce the number of transistors from eight to three in every two cells by sharing transistors. This results in a 50% CAM area reduction.

NEC developed nonvolatile particles aiming for both greater convenience and energy conservation. Additionally, NEC and Tohoku University developed a simulation technology for a circuit diagram including spintronics particles in parallel with designing technologies for massively large integrated circuits for developments involving the most advanced spintronics logic integrated circuits.

NEC and Tohoku University will announce their latest results on June 17 at VLSI Circuit Symposium 2011 (June 13-17, Kyoto).

Provided by NEC

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Plastic Computer Memory Device That Utilizes Electron Spin to Read and Write Data: Alternative to Traditional Semiconductors

Plastic Computer Memory Device That Utilizes Electron Spin to Read and Write Data: Alternative to Traditional Semiconductors

  11:54:00 AM    Science Lover

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Researchers at Ohio State University have demonstrated the first plastic computer memory device that utilizes the spin of electrons to read and write data.

Abstract digital data. (Credit: iStockphoto)

An alternative to traditional microelectronics, so-called "spintronics" could store more data in less space, process data faster, and consume less power.

In the August 2010 issue of the journal Nature Materials, Arthur J. Epstein and colleagues describe how they created a prototype plastic spintronic device using techniques found in the mainstream computer industry today.

At this point, the device is little more than a thin strip of dark blue organic-based magnet layered with a metallic ferromagnet and connected to two electrical leads. (A ferromagnet is a magnet made of ferrous metal such as iron. Common household refrigerator magnets are ferromagnets.) Still, the researchers successfully recorded data on it and retrieved the data by controlling the spins of the electrons with a magnetic field.

Epstein, Distinguished University Professor of physics and chemistry and director of the Institute for Magnetic and Electronic Polymers at Ohio State, described the material as a hybrid of a semiconductor that is made from organic materials and a special magnetic polymer semiconductor. As such, it is a bridge between today's computers and the all-polymer, spintronic computers that he and his partners hope to enable in the future.

Normal electronics encode computer data based on a binary code of ones and zeros, depending on whether an electron is present in a void within the material. But researchers have long known that electrons can be polarized to orient in particular directions, like a bar magnet. They refer to this orientation as spin -- either "spin up" or "spin down" -- and have been working on a way to store data using spin. The resulting electronics, dubbed spintronics, would effectively let computers store and transfer twice as much data per electron.

But higher data density is only part of the story.

"Spintronics is often just seen as a way to get more information out of an electron, but really it's about moving to the next generation of electronics," Epstein said. "We could solve many of the problems facing computers today by using spintronics."

Typical circuit boards use a lot of energy. Moving electrons through them creates heat, and it takes a lot of energy to cool them. Chip makers are limited in how closely they can pack circuits together to avoid overheating.

Flipping the spin of an electron requires less energy, and produces hardly any heat at all, he explained. That means that spintronic devices could run on smaller batteries. If they were made out of plastic, they would also be light and flexible.

"We would love to take portable electronics to a spin platform," Epstein said. "Think about soldiers in the field who have to carry heavy battery packs, or even civilian 'road warriors' commuting to meetings. If we had a lighter weight spintronic device which operates itself at a lower energy cost, and if we could make it on a flexible polymer display, soldiers and other users could just roll it up and carry it. We see this portable technology as a powerful platform for helping people."

The magnetic polymer semiconductor in this study, vanadium tetracyanoethanide, is the first organic-based magnet that operates above room temperature. It was developed by Epstein and his long-standing collaborator Joel S. Miller of the University of Utah. Postdoctoral researcher Jung-Woo Yoo called the new material an important milestone in spintronic research.

"Our main achievement is that we applied this polymer-based magnet semiconductor as a spin polarizer -- meaning we could save data (spin up and down) on it using a tiny magnetic field -- and a spin detector -- meaning we could read the data back," he said. "Now we are closer to constructing a device from all-organic material."

In the prototype device, electrons pass into the polymer, and a magnetic field orients them as spin up or spin down. The electrons can then pass into the conventional magnetic layer, but only if the spin of electrons there are oriented in the same way. If they are not, the resistance is too high for the electrons to pass. So the researchers were able to read spin data from their device based on whether the resistance was high or low.

Collaborators at the University of Wisconsin-Madison prepared a sample of conventional magnetic film, and Yoo and his Ohio State colleagues layered it together with the organic magnet to make a working device.

As a test, the researchers exposed the material to a magnetic field that varied in strength over time. To determine whether the material recorded the magnetic pattern and functioned as a good spin injector/detector, they measured the electric current passing through the two magnetic layers. This method is similar to the way computers read and write data to a magnetic hard drive today.

The results, Yoo said, were "textbook" -- they retrieved the magnetic data in its entirety, exactly as they stored it.

The patented technology should transfer easily to industry, he added. "Any place that makes computer chips could do this. Plus, in this case, we made the device at room temperature, and the process is very eco-friendly."

Coauthors on the paper included Chia-Yi Chen and Vladimir Prigodin of Ohio State, and H.W. Jang, C.W. Bark, and Chang-Beom Eom of the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

This research was funded by the Air Force Office of Scientific Research, the Department of Energy, the National Science Foundation, and the Office of Naval Research.

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