In new research published in Nature Materials, a team of researchers led by Columbia University chemist Xiaoyang Zhu, in collaboration with fellow Columbians Xavier Roy, Milan Delor, Dmitri Basov, and James McIver, has observed coherent ferrons for the first time.

Ferrons are electronic quasiparticles, predicted since the 1960s, that carry polarization. The oscillating polarization wave that the team, led by Columbia postdocs Jeongheon Choe and Taketo Handa, observed represents a new type of information carrier that could prove much faster than conventional electronics.

In ferroelectric materials, the dipole moments of unit cells line up, becoming polarized. Collective excitation of these dipoles creates the ferron quasiparticle, which has an inherent dipole moment. This means one side of each tiny particle is slightly more negatively charged than the other. Ferrons are similar to another quasiparticle that’s been of interest to Zhu and colleagues in recent years: magnons.