Researchers Discover a Material With Brain-Like Learning Capabilities
Vanadium Dioxide has the ability to “remember” the entire history of past environmental stimuli.
During his research on phase transitions in Vanadium Dioxide (VO2), Mohammad Samizadeh Nikoo, a Ph.D. student at Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne’s (EPFL) Power and Wide-band-gap Electronics Research Laboratory (POWERlab), made an unexpected finding. When relaxed at room temperature, VO2 has an insulating phase and experiences a sharp insulator-to-metal transition at 68 °C (154 °F), where its lattice structure changes.
According to Samizadeh Nikoo, VO2 has a volatile memory: “the material reverts back to the insulating state right after removing the excitation.” He set out to find how long it takes for VO2 to change from one state to another for his thesis. However, his investigation took a different turn: after collecting hundreds of measurements, he discovered a memory effect in the material’s structure.
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