Episode 9: Stacking materials induces ferroelectricity into wurtzites

In this podcast episode, MRS Bulletin’s Sophia Chen interviews Beth Dickey from Carnegie Mellon University about her new approach to inducing ferroelectricity into a material. Dickey’s research group worked with a class of materials known as wurtzites. The researchers specifically studied aluminum nitride and zinc oxide, which are not ferroelectric in their pristine form at room temperature. However, alloys of these materials are ferroelectric. When the researchers stacked the ferroelectric alloy with a non-ferroelectric wurtzite and applied electric fields to the material, they found that the crystal lattice of the ferroelectric layer began to invert, then switching propagated into the pristine wurtzite, confirming that the entire material was ferroelectric. The results of this study could lead to development of ferroelectric materials for computers where memory and computation can be brought together into a single device, saving energy. This work was published in a recent issue of Nature.