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The discovery could help engineers design ultra-low-power, high-capacity data storage devices for classical and quantum computers. Multiferroic materials are of interest for electronics because they could potentially increase the speed and lower the energy cost of hard drives. Magnetic hard drives store data in the form of magnetic domains — essentially, microscopic magnets that are read as either a 1 or a 0, depending on their magnetic orientation. The magnets are switched by an electric current, which consumes a lot of energy and cannot operate quickly.
“In five layers, electrons happen to be in a lattice environment where they move very slowly, so they can interact with other electrons effectively,” Ju says. “That’s when electron correlation effects start to dominate, and they can start to coordinate into certain preferred, ferroic orders.”The researchers then went into the lab to see whether they could actually observe multiferroic behavior in five-layer graphene.
The second ferroic property had to do with graphene’s electronic “valley.” In every conductive material, there are certain energy levels that electrons can occupy. A valley represents the lowest energy state that an electron can naturally settle. As it turns out, there are two possible valleys in graphene. Normally, electrons have no preference for either valley and settle equally into both.