A Chemical turnstile

TL;DR

This paper proposes using ferroelastic twin walls as a medium for a chemical turnstile, demonstrating through simulations that stress-induced reorientation enables atom transport, a key step toward building such a device.

Contribution

It introduces ferroelastic twin walls as a novel medium for chemical turnstiles and shows their potential through simulation of stress-induced reorientation.

Findings

Twin walls can act as fast atomic transport planes.

Stress-induced reorientation of twin walls is feasible.

Potential application in chemical turnstile devices.

Abstract

A chemical turnstile is a device for transporting small, well-characterised doses of atoms from one location to another. A working turnstile has yet to be built, despite the numerous technological applications available for such a device. The key difficulty in manufacturing a chemical turnstile is finding a medium which will trap and transport atoms. Here we propose that ferroelastic twin walls are suitable for this role. Previous work shows that twin walls can act as two-dimensional trapping planes within which atomic transport is fast. We report simulations showing that a stress-induced reorientation of a twin wall can occur. This behaviour is ideal for chemical turnstile applications.