Researchers have developed a new method to manipulate a range of materials using helium "balloons."
The new technique boosts our understanding of complex oxide materials, and help harness properties such as hard-to-control superconductivity and colossal magnetoresistance, the Oak Ridge National Laboratory reported.
For the first time in history, researchers successfully controlled the elongation of a crystalline material along a single direction without changing the length in the other direction. This was accomplished by adding helium ions into a complex oxide material.
"By putting a little helium into the material, we're able to control strain along a single axis," said ORNL's Zac Ward, who led the team's study. "This type of control wasn't possible before, and it allows you to tune material properties with a finesse that we haven't previously had access to."
The way in which these ions are bound together triggers changes in the electronic properties of the complex oxides, giving scientists more control. These findings could bring us one step closer to bringing complex materials into commercial applications.
"Our strain doping technique demonstrates a path to achieving this need, as it can be implemented using established ion implantation infrastructure in the semiconductor industry," Ward said.
The new technique will also benefit theoretical research that aims to predict the behavior of complex materials.
"The complexity of these materials requires a huge equation to explain their behaviors," Ward said. "Normal strain tuning methods require you to change many variables in that equation which means that you don't really know which one is giving you a specific reaction. In our case, there's one variable. You can feed in a single term and try to break through that complexity a little bit by simplifying it. This is a great method to experimentally probe theoretical models."
The findings were published in a recent edition of the journal Physical Review Letters.
