Wednesday, July 16, 2025
  • About us
    • Write for us
    • Disclaimer
    • Terms of use
    • Privacy Policy
  • RSS Feeds
  • Advertise with us
  • Contact us
DefenceTalk
  • Home
  • Defense News
    • Defense & Geopolitics News
    • War Conflicts News
    • Army News
    • Air Force News
    • Navy News
    • Missiles Systems News
    • Nuclear Weapons
    • Defense Technology
    • Cybersecurity News
  • Military Photos
  • Defense Forum
  • Military Videos
  • Military Weapon Systems
    • Weapon Systems
    • Reports
No Result
View All Result
  • Home
  • Defense News
    • Defense & Geopolitics News
    • War Conflicts News
    • Army News
    • Air Force News
    • Navy News
    • Missiles Systems News
    • Nuclear Weapons
    • Defense Technology
    • Cybersecurity News
  • Military Photos
  • Defense Forum
  • Military Videos
  • Military Weapon Systems
    • Weapon Systems
    • Reports
No Result
View All Result
DefenceTalk
No Result
View All Result
Home Defence & Military News Technology News

Self-correcting crystal may unleash the next generation of advanced communications

by USGovernment
November 7, 2013
in Technology News
3 min read
0
Malware hunter Kaspersky warns of cyber war dangers
14
VIEWS

Researchers from the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) have joined with an international team to engineer and measure a potentially important new class of nanostructured materials for microwave and advanced communication devices. Based on NIST’s measurements, the new materials-a family of multilayered crystalline sandwiches-might enable a whole new class of compact, high-performance, high-efficiency components for devices such as cellular phones.*

“These materials are an excellent example of what the Materials Genome Initiative refers to as ‘materials-by-design’,” says NIST physicist James Booth, one of the lead researchers. “Materials science is getting better and better at engineering complex structures at an atomic scale to create materials with previously unheard-of properties.”

The new multilayer crystals are so-called “tunable dielectrics,” the heart of electronic devices that, for example, enable cell phones to tune to a precise frequency, picking a unique signal out of the welter of possible ones.

Tunable dielectrics that work well in the microwave range and beyond-modern communications applications typically use frequencies around a few gigahertz-have been hard to make, according to NIST materials scientist Nathan Orloff. “People have created tunable microwave dielectrics for decades, but they’ve always used up way too much power.” These new materials work well up to 100 GHz, opening the door for the next generation of devices for advanced communications.

Modern cellphone dielectrics use materials that suffer from misplaced or missing atoms called “defects” within their crystal structure, which interfere with the dielectric properties and lead to power loss. One major feature of the new materials, says Orloff, is that they self-correct, reducing the effect of defects in the part of the crystal where it counts.

“We refer to this material as having ‘perfect faults’,” he says. “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 has layers of strontium oxide, believed to be responsible for the self-correcting feature, separating a variable number of layers of strontium titanate. Strontium titanate on its own is normally a pretty stable dielectric-not really tunable at all-but another bit of nanostructure wizardry solves that.

The sandwich layers are grown as a thin crystalline film on top of a substrate material with a mismatched crystal spacing that produces strain within the strontium titanate structure that makes it a less stable dielectric-but one that can be tuned. “It’s like putting a queen-sized sheet on a king-sized bed,” says Orloff. “The combination of strain with defect control leads to the unique electronic properties.”

One key discovery by the research team was that, in addition to adding strain to the crystal sandwich, adding additional layers of strontium titanate in between the strontium oxide layers increased the room-temperature “tunability” performance of the structure, providing a new mechanism to control the material response. The material they reported on recently in the journal Nature has six layers of strontium titanate between each strontium oxide layer.

The new sandwich material performs so well as a tunable dielectric, over such a broad range of frequencies, that the NIST team led by Booth had to develop a new measurement technique-an array of test structures fabricated on top of the test film-just to measure its electronic characteristics.

“We were able to characterize the performance of these materials as a function of frequency running from 10 hertz all the way up to 125 gigahertz. That’s the equivalent of measuring wavelengths from kilometers down to microns all with the same experimental set-up,” says Orloff, adding, “This material has a much lower loss and a much higher tunability for a given applied field then any material that we have seen.”

An international team of researchers contributed to the recent paper, representing, in addition to NIST, Cornell University, the University of Maryland, Pennsylvania State University, the Institute of Physics ASCR (Czech Republic), Universitat Politecnica de Catalunya (Spain), the Kavli Institute at Cornell for Nanoscale Science, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, the Leibniz Institute for Crystal Growth (Germany), The University of Texas at Austin and Temple University.

*C-H Lee, N.D. Orloff, T. Birol, Y. Zhu, V. Goian, E. Rocas, R. Haislmaier, E. Vlahos, J.A. Mundy, L.F. Kourkoutis, Y. Nie, M.D. Biegalski, J. Zhang, M. Bernhagen, N.A. Benedek, Y. Kim, J.D. Brock, R.Uecker, X.X. Xi, V. Gopalan, D. Nuzhnyy, S. Kamba, D.A. Muller, I. Takeuchi, J.C. Booth, C.J. Fennie and D.G. Schlom. Exploiting dimensionality and defect mitigation to create tunable microwave dielectrics. Nature, 502, 532, Oct. 24, 2013. doi:10.1038/nature12582.

Tags: communicationscrystalsnanoNIST
Previous Post

The End of the Iraq War Offers Lessons for Withdrawal from Afghanistan

Next Post

New Offshore Patrol Vessels for Royal Navy

Related Posts

Air Force Research Lab Announces MUOS Satellite Communications Testing in Antarctica

Trojan Horses in Space: Cyber Threats Hidden in Satellite Networks

April 8, 2025

Most of us like satellites. They power our televisions. Allow us to find our way home from anywhere on the...

Chatbot vs national security? Why DeepSeek is raising concerns

Chatbot vs national security? Why DeepSeek is raising concerns

February 17, 2025

Chinese AI chatbot DeepSeek upended the global industry and wiped billions off US tech stocks when it unveiled its R1...

Next Post
New Offshore Patrol Vessels for Royal Navy

New Offshore Patrol Vessels for Royal Navy

Latest Defense News

Britain, Germany jointly developing missiles: ministers

Britain, Germany jointly developing missiles: ministers

May 17, 2025
Trump announces ‘full and immediate’ India-Pakistan ceasefire

Trump announces ‘full and immediate’ India-Pakistan ceasefire

May 10, 2025
Pakistan says Indian missiles strike air bases as conflict spirals

Pakistan says Indian missiles strike air bases as conflict spirals

May 10, 2025
J-10C fighter jet

Pakistan says India has brought neighbours ‘closer to major conflict’

May 9, 2025
North Korea fires multiple suspected cruise missiles

North Korea fires flurry of short-range ballistic missiles

May 9, 2025
China says ‘closely watching’ Ukraine situation after Russian attack

China vows to stand with Russia in face of ‘hegemonic bullying’

May 9, 2025

Defense Forum Discussions

  • The Russian-Ukrainian War Thread
  • USAF News and Discussion
  • Royal Netherlands Navy
  • Indian Military Aviation; News, Updates & Discussions
  • Russia - General Discussion.
  • Russian Air Force News & Discussion
  • Royal Australian Navy Discussions and Updates 2.0
  • US Navy News and updates
  • General Aviation Thread
  • Indonesian Aero News
DefenceTalk

© 2003-2020 DefenceTalk.com

Navigate Site

  • Defence Forum
  • Military Photos
  • RSS Feeds
  • About us
  • Advertise with us
  • Contact us

Follow Us

No Result
View All Result
  • Home
  • Defense News
    • Defense & Geopolitics News
    • War Conflicts News
    • Army News
    • Air Force News
    • Navy News
    • Missiles Systems News
    • Nuclear Weapons
    • Defense Technology
    • Cybersecurity News
  • Military Photos
  • Defense Forum
  • Military Videos
  • Military Weapon Systems
    • Weapon Systems
    • Reports

© 2003-2020 DefenceTalk.com