Imagine biting into a peanut butter sandwich and discovering a slice of cheese tucked between the bread and the butter. In a way, this is what happened to a team of physicists at the University of Arizona, except the “cheese” was a layer of iron oxide, less than one atomic layer thick, and the “sandwich” was a magnetic tunnel junction—a tiny, layered structure of exotic materials that someday may replace current silicon-based computer transistors and revolutionize computing. Iron oxide—a material related to what is commonly known as rust—exhibits exotic properties when its thickness approaches that of single atoms.
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Source: Phys.org