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Magnetoelectrics

Making metallic memories

Nature Nanotechnology volume 5, pages 761–762 (2010)Cite this article

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A Correction to this article was published on 04 November 2010

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A phase transition at the surface of a thin film of iron can be exploited to create a metallic non-volatile memory.

Electromagnetic devices pervade our daily lives, but devices that exploit the coupling between electric and magnetic phenomena in materials are surprisingly rare. Magnetic data-storage media, for example, generally require magnetic fields to read and write the data stored on them. However, controlling magnetic order with electric fields, and vice versa, may allow useful new classes of devices to be developed. So far research into such magnetoelectric effects has focused exclusively on insulators because they are able to sustain an electric field or a spontaneous polarization. Writing in Nature Nanotechnology, Wulf Wulfhekel of the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology and co-workers1 in Germany, Japan, Romania and the United States demonstrate that magnetoelectric effects can also be produced in metallic systems by using an electric field to cause a phase transition at the surface of a thin iron film.

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Figure 1: A hypothetical memory device exploiting magnetoelectric coupling in metallic thin films.

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  • 04 November 2010

    In the original and print version of this News & Views, in the second sentence of the third paragraph, 'millivolts' should have read 'megavolts'. In the second sentence of the sixth paragraph, 'mV' should have read 'MV'. The HTML and PDF versions of the text are correct.

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  1. Ramamoorthy Ramesh is in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering and Department of Physics, University of California, Berkeley, California 94720, USA. rramesh@berkeley.edu,

    Ramamoorthy Ramesh

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  1. Ramamoorthy Ramesh
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Ramesh, R. Making metallic memories. Nature Nanotech 5, 761–762 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1038/nnano.2010.218

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