Perfect Faults...

Not a brick wall. Electron microscope image of a cross section of the newly characterized tunable microwave dielectric clearly shows the thick layers of strontium titanate "bricks" separated by thin "mortar lines" of strontium oxide that help promote the largely defect-free growth of the bricks.
Credit: TEM image courtesy David Mueller. Color added for clarity by Nathan Orloff.

Researchers from the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) have joined with an international team to engineer and measure a potentially important new class of nanostructured materials for microwave and advanced communication devices. Based on NIST's measurements, the new materials—a family of multilayered crystalline sandwiches—might enable a whole new class of compact, high-performance, high-efficiency components for devices such as cellular phones.*

"These materials are an excellent example of what the Materials Genome Initiative refers to as 'materials-by-design'," says NIST physicist James Booth, one of the lead researchers. "Materials science is getting better and better at engineering complex structures at an atomic scale to create materials with previously unheard-of properties."

The new multilayer crystals are so-called "tunable dielectrics," the heart of electronic devices that, for example, enable cell phones to tune to a precise frequency, picking a unique signal out of the welter of possible ones.

Tunable dielectrics that work well in the microwave range and beyond—modern communications applications typically use frequencies around a few gigahertz—have been hard to make, according to NIST materials scientist Nathan Orloff. "People have created tunable microwave dielectrics for decades, but they've always used up way too much power." These new materials work well up to 100 GHz, opening the door for the next generation of devices for advanced communications.

What this means to you: as you'll read in the article, it could mean an end to dropped cell phone calls (or, at least minimizing it significantly)...

*C-H Lee, N.D. Orloff, T. Birol, Y. Zhu, V. Goian, E. Rocas, R. Haislmaier, E. Vlahos, J.A. Mundy, L.F. Kourkoutis, Y. Nie, M.D. Biegalski, J. Zhang, M. Bernhagen, N.A. Benedek, Y. Kim, J.D. Brock, R.Uecker, X.X. Xi, V. Gopalan, D. Nuzhnyy, S. Kamba, D.A. Muller, I. Takeuchi, J.C. Booth, C.J. Fennie and D.G. Schlom. Exploiting dimensionality and defect mitigation to create tunable microwave dielectrics. Nature, 502, 532–536, Oct. 24, 2013. doi:10.1038/nature12582.

National Institute of Standards and Technology:
Perfect Faults: A Self-Correcting Crystal May Unleash the Next Generation of Advanced Communications