Researchers have discovered a substance that can ‘remember’ in the same way that humans do.
Vanadium dioxide (VO2) is capable of "remembering" the full history of past external stimuli, according to researchers at École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL).
Vanadium dioxide is the first substance found by EPFL researchers that possess this feature.
The findings were published today in the journal Nature.
During his research on phase transitions in vanadium dioxide, Mohammad Samizadeh Nikoo, a Ph.D. student at EPFL's Power and Wide-band-gap Electronics Research Laboratory (PowerLab), made an unintentional finding (VO2).
According to the study, when relaxed at room temperature, VO2 has an insulating phase and undergoes a steep insulator-to-metal transition at 68 °C, where its lattice structure changes.
VO2 has volatile properties under typical settings. "The mater...