Unprecedented Subatomic Details of Exotic Ferroelectric Nanomaterials

As scientists learn to manipulate little-understood nanoscale materials, they are laying the foundation for a future of more compact, efficient, and innovative devices. In research to be published online July 8 in the journal Nature Materials, scientists at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Brookhaven National Laboratory, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, and other collaborating institutions describe one such advance — a technique revealing unprecedented details about the atomic structure and behavior of exotic ferroelectric materials, which are uniquely equipped to store digital information. This research could guide the scaling up of these exciting materials and usher in a new generation of advanced electronics.

Brookhaven scientists used a technique called electron holography to capture images of the electric fields created by the materials’ atomic displacement with picometer precision — that’s the trillionths-of-a-meter scale crucial to understanding these promising nanoparticles... Link