Physicists develop transformable nanoscale electronic devices

The nanoscale electronic parts in devices like smartphones are solid, static objects that once designed and built cannot transform into anything else. Physicists from the University of California, Irvine have developed nanoscale devices that can transform into many different shapes and sizes even though they exist in solid states. This finding could change the nature of electronic devices, as well as the way scientists research atomic-scale quantum materials. The study was published in Science Advances.

Javier Sanchez-Yamagishi, an assistant professor of physics and astronomy whose lab performed the research, said the researchers discovered that for a particular set of materials, you can make nanoscale electronic devices that aren’t stuck together. “The parts can move, and so that allows us to modify the size and shape of a device after it’s been made,” Sanchez-Yamagishi said.

The electronic devices are modifiable much like refrigerator door magnets — stuck on but can be reconfigured into any pattern. Ian Sequeira, a PhD student in Sanchez-Yamagishi’s lab, said the research is significant, because it demonstrates a new property that can be utilised in these materials that allows for fundamentally different types of device architectures to be realised, including mechanically reconfiguring parts of a circuit.

Sanchez-Yamagishi and his team, which includes UCI PhD student Andrew Barabas, reportedly did not set out to develop transformable nanoscale devices. “It was definitely not what we were initially setting out to do. We expected everything to be static, but what happened was we were in the middle of trying to measure it, and we accidentally bumped into the device, and we saw that it moved,” Sanchez-Yamagishi said.

What the researchers saw was that tiny nanoscale gold wires could slide with very low friction on top of special crystals called ‘van der Waals materials’. Taking advantage of these slippery interfaces, the researchers made electronic devices made of single-atom-thick sheets of a substance called graphene attached to gold wires that can be transformed into a variety of different configurations on the fly. Because it conducts electricity so well, gold is a common part of electronic components. However, it is still unclear how the discovery could impact industries that use such devices.

“The initial story is more about the basic science of it, although it is an idea which could one day have an effect on industry. This germinates the idea of it. It could fundamentally change how people do research in this field,” Sanchez-Yamagishi said.

The researchers believe that their work could help advance quantum science research. “Researchers dream of having flexibility and control in their experiments, but there are a lot of restrictions when dealing with nanoscale materials. Our results show that what was once thought to be fixed and static can be made flexible and dynamic,” Sanchez-Yamagishi said.

Image caption: The golden parts of the device depicted in the above graphic are transformable, an ability that is “not realisable with the current materials used in industry”, said Ian Sequeira, a PhD student who worked to develop the technology in the laboratory of Javiar Sanchez-Yamahgishi, UCI assistant professor of physics & astronomy. Image credit: Yuhui Yang/UCI.