R&D Mag – If you are not a condensed matter physicist, vanadium oxide may be the coolest material you’ve never heard of. It’s a metal. It’s an insulator. It’s a window coating and an optical switch.
So what is vanadium oxide? It’s an oxidized form of the metal vanadium, an ingredient in hardened steel. When oxygen reacts with vanadium to form vanadium oxide, the atoms form crystals that look like long rectangular boxes. The vanadium atoms line up along the four edges of the box in regularly spaced rows. A single crystal of vanadium oxide can have many of these boxes lined up side by side, and the crystals conduct electricity like wire as long as they are kept warm.
“The weird thing about this material is that if you cool it, when you get to 67 C, it goes through a phase transition that is both electronic and structural,” said Rice’s Douglas Natelson, lead co-author of the study in Nature Nanotechnology. more> http://tinyurl.com/ch3c72y
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