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Materials science

Build your own superlattice

Nature volume 433, pages 369–370 (2005)Cite this article

Artificial materials made from oxide building blocks turn out to be excellent ferroelectrics. This shows that materials with specific properties can be designed by atomic-scale tailoring of their composition.

Ferroelectric oxides are used in a wide range of applications — random-access memories in computers, accelerometers in airbags or inkjet printers, telecommunication signal-processing devices and high-frequency devices for ultrasonic medical imaging, to name just a few. Predictions1 that the performance of a ferroelectric oxide can be significantly improved by combining it with other oxides in a carefully tailored lattice have now been borne out by experiment. On page 395 of this issue, Lee et al.2 show that such a ‘superlattice’ has a 50% enhancement in ferroelectric polarization compared with barium titanate, its only ferroelectric component. One of the key aspects of their method is the degree of control achieved at the atomic level during the growth of this artificial material.

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Figure 1: Building regulation — a Lego version of the superlattice structure shown in Fig. 1d2.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. MESA + Institute for Nanotechnology, and the Faculty of Science and Technology, University of Twente, PO Box 217, Enschede, The Netherlands

    Guus Rijnders & Dave H. A. Blank

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  1. Guus Rijnders
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  2. Dave H. A. Blank
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Rijnders, G., Blank, D. Build your own superlattice. Nature 433, 369–370 (2005). https://doi.org/10.1038/433369a

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