Expanding the limits of ferroelectrics

Chiara Gattinoni, a materials theorist and Marie Curie Fellow at ETH Zurich, uses the "Piz Daint" supercomputer at CSCS to investigate a special class of materials: ferroelectrics. In the future, these materials could constitute the heart of low-energy-consuming, miniaturised data storage in electrical devices. One ferroelectric Gattinoni analysed is, according to her, truly magical. Today, electronic devices like computers or smartphones rely on two physical principles: electric materials to process information and magnetic materials to store it. However, magnetic data storage consumes a substantial amount of energy, since it requires magnetic fields generated from comparatively large magnets. In contrast, the generation of electric fields requires much less energy, and an electric memory could drastically reduce the energy demand of future electronic devices. That's why Marie Curie Fellow Chiara Gattinoni and her colleagues in the materials theory group of ETH professor Nicola Spaldin investigate so-called ferroelectrics.