Watch our video above to discover why understanding the Fundamental Science of exactly how electrons order in the mineral magnetite, will have far reaching implications for how we think about, and ultimately design many technologically important functional materials.
"Fundamental Science Matters” is our science outreach project where we seek to explain the importance of our research which tackles fundamental scientific problems. Our work aims to deliver mechanistic insights which in the long terms will impact on the design of functional materials which are key in developing a greener more sustainable society. We highlight several of our research areas below, and try to explain the key revelations that our work has bought about and the “real world” impact that these findings may ultimately have.
Molecular-like ordering in Magnetite
Controlling Thermal Expansion
Most materials expand when you heat them up. This very Fundamental Property can lead to a variety of real world problems, such as delayed trains due to excessive track expansion on a hot day.
Intuitively we understand that materials expand when heated, because their constituent atoms start to vibrate more and so move further apart. However, some materials vibrate in such a away that certain atoms actual move closer to each other, as shown the animation above.
In a certain class of materials we have learned how to precisely control these kind of vibrations and hence their thermal expansion properties . This is exciting because in the future we will be able to engineer materials to eradicate thermal expansion related device failure, and control a host of other interesting properties closely related to thermal expansion. You can read some of the articles which have been written about our work below:
Diamond Light Source Highlight
And you can access our article that details these findings here.
Understanding Ferroelectrics
Barium Titanate (BaTiO3) is possibly one of the most widely used functional materials. What makes it so useful is that below a certain temperature it can store a permanent charge. If you have a large sample of BaTiO3, one side of it will have a positive charge and the other a negative charge. This is a very useful property, as it means it can be used as a capacitor in electronics. Almost every electronic device contains capacitors based on BaTiO3 type materials.
More recently, the +/- charged states in these kind of materials have been used as computer storage bits, where they can be switched by the application of an electric field between the two state in a “write” process to store data. This is very exciting, but even though the ferroelectric properties of BaTiO3 have been known about since the 40’s, the precise Fundamental Science that underpins the process is still not well understood.
Our work has helped resolve long standing controversy in this field and our insights will in the long term enable others to design new and improved functional materials for applications in a host of technologies.