Researchers from the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) in the US are working with an international group to use nanostructured, self-correcting, multilayer materials for microwave and sophisticated communication devices.
As per the measurements, the new multilayer crystals dubbed ‘tunable dielectrics’ would enable new developing compact, high-performance, high-efficiency components for devices including cellular phones.
NIST physicist James Booth said these materials are an excellent example of what the Materials Genome Initiative refers to as ‘materials-by-design’.
"Materials science is getting better and better at engineering complex structures at an atomic scale to create materials with previously unheard-of properties," Booth said.
The new multilayer crystals would allow cell phones to adjust to a precise frequency, selecting an exclusive signal out of the muddle of possible ones.
According to NIST materials scientist Nathan Orloff tunable, dielectrics that operate well in the microwave range and beyond are hard to be made.
"People have created tunable microwave dielectrics for decades, but they’ve always used up way too much power," Orloff added.
Latest cellphone dielectrics deploy materials that go through misplaced or missing atoms known as ‘defects’ within their crystal structure, which obstruct the dielectric properties, leading to power loss.
The new tunable dielectrics are claimed to be self-correcting, trimming down the effect of faults in the unit of the crystal where it counts.
"We refer to this material as having ‘perfect faults’, Orloff said.
"When it’s being grown, one portion accommodates defects without affecting the good parts of the crystal.
"It’s able to correct itself and create perfect dielectric bricks that result in the rare combination of high tuning and low loss."
The new material incorporates layers of strontium oxide, which are responsible for the self-correcting feature, and separate an erratic number of layers of strontium titanate.
The research also revealed that the addition of strain to the crystal sandwich as well as adding up more layers of strontium titanate in between the layers of strontium oxide boosted the room-temperature ‘tunability’ performance of the structure.
Researchers also revealed that the new sandwich material operates same as a tunable dielectric, over such a broad range of frequencies,
"We were able to characterise the performance of these materials as a function of frequency running from 10 hertz all the way up to 125 gigahertz," Orloff added.
"That’s the equivalent of measuring wavelengths from kilometres down to microns all with the same experimental set-up.
"This material has a much lower loss and a much higher tunability for a given applied field then any material that we have seen."
