Thin films show surprising reactivity
A surprising MIT laboratory finding about the behavior of a thin sheet of material — less than a thousandth of the thickness of a human hair — could lead to improved ways of studying the behavior of electrodes and perhaps ultimately to improvements in the rate of power production from one type of fuel cell, according to a report published this week.In many cases, thin layers of a material — which may be just a few molecules in thickness — exhibit properties different from solid blocks of the same material. But even though this is a known phenomenon, the nature of the difference the MIT team found in the behavior of thin films of a mineral called perovskite — in this case, deposited as a thin layer on the surface of a crystal of zirconia — “was very much unexpected,” says Yang Shao-Horn, associate professor of mechanical engineering and materials...