Rare materials that shrink when heated could lead to more stable electronics

Researchers have discovered a material that could compensate for the damaging expansion that takes place when electronic components are heated. Most materials expand when heated, but a few rare materials do the opposite and contract. The contraction usually occurs only over a narrow temperature range and is not easy to tune, but now researchers have discovered a material that can be chemically tailored to either expand or contract in a precise way and over a wide temperature range. Our understanding of the processes underlying the effect means that we can search for it in related materials in the perovskite family or in other classes of materials with wide applications. This could lead to new composite materials that do not expand when heated, improving the stability of many essential components in electronic equipment. The discovery of the effect in this material, which is a type of perovskite, is published today in the Journal of the American Chemical Society . Electronic components often expand at different rates when heated.