Scientists have created a new material that combines both electrical and magnetic order at room temperature and could open the door for the development of low-energy computer memory technologies.

The groundbreaking new material could have both storage and processing applications, the University of Liverpool reported. Information can be stored in computers through either methods involving atomic-scale magnets in a solid material or atomic-scale electrical charges, but both of these techniques require energy. In the growing age of the Internet, scientists are now looking for new low-energy ways to store information. Now, the promising material was created through the designed control of the distribution of the atoms within the solid state, and could help researchers achieve these goals.

"Materials with both electrical and magnetic order at room temperature have been hard to engineer because these two properties often have competing requirements," said Liverpool Materials Chemist, Professor Matthew Rosseinsky. "We report a new design approach that promises to allow the synthesis and tuning of families of these materials, which are important in the development of low-energy computer memory technologies."

Creating a material possessing the two distinct properties of magnetization and electrical polarization is extremely difficult because crystal structures or atomic compositions that favor polarization often disfavor magnetism. The new material finally overcomes these roadblocks, allowing for a two-propertied material that may help achieve low-energy computing.

"We expect this strategy to allow the generation of a range of tunable multiferroic materials," the researchers concluded in the study abstract.

The findings were published in a recent edition of the journal Nature.