Mar 07, 2014 09:47 AM EST By Russell Westerholm, UniversityHerald Reporter

New research may have figured out how to extend ever further the life of powerful batteries that charge our most advanced devices, a class of magnetic materials called "multiferroics."

After a period of continuous use, a person's laptop or smartphone will get warm due to microprocessors performing the device's various functions. To do this, it generates an electric current, which is actually unnecessarily using energy.

Multiferroics are the subject of research for a team from the UCLA Henry Samueli School of Engineering and Applied Science, according to a press release. The project could lengthen the life of batteries already powerful enough to charge our most advanced devices for dozens of hours on end.

In any device, electrons pass through transistors, which act as tony electronic switches. The electric current generated by the microprocessors cause a flow of electrons, which is where heat is generated. The problem with microprocessors is they keep getting smaller while more chips and wires are crammed into our devices to give them more capabilities. The transistors are known to sometimes "leak" electrons, wasting heat and wasting energy.

"Spin waves open an opportunity to realize fundamentally new ways of computing while solving some of the key challenges faced by scaling of conventional semiconductor technology, potentially creating a new paradigm of spin-based electronics," study principal investigator Kang L. Wang, a UCLA professor of electrical engineering, said in the release.

Spin waves are more akin to an ocean wave rolling onto the beach, whereas an electric current is more like water flowing through a pipe, said Wang.

Published in the journal Applied Physical Letters, the research team aimed to help science keep up with all the technological advances in the world. Multiferroics are a switch that can turned on or off by applying the difference of voltage in electrical potential. It also delivers electrons in a spin wave.

"Electrical control of magnetism without involving charge currents is a fast-growing area of interest in magnetics research," study co-author Pedram Khalili, a UCLA assistant adjunct professor of electrical engineering, said in the release. "It can have major implications for future information processing and data-storage devices, and our recent results are exciting in that context."

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