News Summary

• Researchers at the University of Minnesota Twin Cities have demonstrated an unexpected new way to change how a metal behaves electronically.
• By carefully engineering the atomic interactions where two materials come into contact, the team was able to significantly alter the properties of a metallic material.
• The effect was achieved simply by changing the thickness of an ultra-thin film by a few nanometers.
• The most dramatic changes occurred when the ruthenium dioxide film reached approximately 4 nanometers thick, which is about the width of a single DNA strand.