Scienceblogtwo

Mohammad Samizadeh Nikoo, a Ph.D. candidate at the Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) Power and Wide-band-gap Electronics Research Laboratory (POWERlab), made an unexpected discovery while doing research on phase transitions in vanadium dioxide (VO2). Around ambient temperature, VO2 has an insulating phase and, at 68 °C, undergoes a rapid transition from an insulator to a metal, changing its lattice structure. Samizadeh Nikoo asserts that VO2 has a volatile memory because "it immediately returns to the insulating state after the excitation is removed." For his thesis, he set out to determine how long it takes for VO2 to transition between states. His research, however, took an unexpected turn when, after taking hundreds of measurements, he identified a memory effect in the composition of the material. Samizadeh Nikoo used an electric current to treat VO2 samples in his research. According to him, "the current traveled through the substance, following a path,...