A team led by Oak Ridge National Laboratory's Ho Nyung Lee
has discovered a strain relaxation phenomenon in cobaltites that has eluded
researchers for decades and may lead to advances in fuel cells, magnetic
sensors and a host of energy-related materials.
The finding, published in Nano Letters, could change the
conventional wisdom that accommodating the strain inherent during the formation
of epitaxial thin films necessarily involves structural defects, said Lee, a
member of the Department of Energy lab's Materials Science and Technology
Division. Instead, the researchers found that some materials, in this case
cobaltite, form structurally well ordered atomic patterns that can change their
magnetic properties and effectively minimize the size mismatch with the
crystalline substrate.