English

A Chemical turnstile

Mesoscale and Nanoscale Physics 2011-03-23 v1 Materials Science

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.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1103.4345,
  title  = {A Chemical turnstile},
  author = {W. T. Lee and E. K. H. Salje},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1103.4345},
  year   = {2011}
}

Comments

2 pages, 3 figures

R2 v1 2026-06-21T17:43:05.184Z