University of Warwick researchers have created a new material combining two properties, magnetism and electrical polarization, that scientists have struggled to bring together for decades—and crucially, it works close to room temperature.
Materials with both magnetism and electrical polarization, known as magnetoelectrics, are highly prized because they allow magnetic information to be switched using an electric field rather than a magnetic one. That could make future computer memory far more energy-efficient, an increasingly urgent problem as data centers and AI systems place growing demands on the power grid. The problem is that most magnetoelectric materials only work at extremely cold temperatures, ruling them out for everyday use.
The new material, reported in the journal Journal of the American Chemical Society, is a form of strontium manganite and gets around this by using a simple structural trick: Pairs of atoms inside its crystal structure tilt together in a coordinated way. This tiny shift is enough to generate an electrical charge across the material while also giving it a weak, switchable magnetism.
Crucially, the charge does not depend on the magnetism, unlike in most magnetoelectrics, where the two are locked together and only survive at extremely cold temperatures. Because the structural shift and the magnetism here are independently stable, both persist at far higher, and far more practical, temperatures.
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