Ferroelectric hafnium zirconium oxide (HZO) is being pursued for all sorts of next generation computing architectures. This intriguing phase has to be tricked into existing, however. Specere recently showed that you could “trick” HZO by simply patterning with a visible laser to alter the vacancy concentration causing an enhancement in the ferroelectric phase.

There’s a new lane on the heat transfer highway. Jacob Minyard’s paper in J. Applied Physics shows that this quasiparticle of light and heat is a real contributor to moving thermal energy in ultrathin layers like those in modern electronics.

Thomas gets named as ASME Fellow.