“It can open a new sphere.”

Scientists at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) and UC Berkeley may have just discovered the secret to making electronic devices smaller and more efficient using tiny electronic components called microcapacitors, SciTechDaily reports.

Microcapacitors could enable energy to be stored directly on the microchips of devices, minimizing energy losses that occur when energy is transferred between different parts of devices.

Berkeley scientists have developed microcapacitors with thin films of hafnium oxide and zirconium oxide, achieving record high energy and power densities. They published their research results in the journal Nature.

As with many scientific discoveries, the researchers behind it had been working on this problem for years, but were ultimately surprised by how good their results were.

“The resulting energy and power density are much higher than we expected,” said Sayeef Salahuddin, a professor at the University of California, Berkeley, who led the project. “We have been developing negative capacitance materials for many years, but the results were quite surprising.”

The discovery could directly lead to smaller and more efficient electronic devices such as phones, sensors, personal computers and more.

“With this technology, we can finally start realizing energy storage and delivery seamlessly integrated on a chip in very small sizes,” said Suraj Cheema, one of the researchers and co-author of the paper. “It could open up a new field of energy technologies for microelectronics.”

Much of the research taking place in and around clean energy is currently focused on improving battery technology – and as we have seen, this problem can be approached from many different perspectives, from making batteries more efficient to creating them using less energy. materials harmful to the environment, to developing ways of producing them cheaper.

All of these approaches, in their own way, help in efforts to move beyond dirty energy sources – mainly gas and oil – that cause huge amounts of air pollution and have led to our planet overheating. By making clean energy and battery storage more cost-effective, each of these breakthroughs has the potential to have a huge positive impact.

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