Hydrogen-induced tunable remanent polarization in a perovskite nickelate.

Materials with field-tunable polarization are of broad interest to condensed matter sciences and solid-state device technologies. Here, using hydrogen (H) donor doping, we modify the room temperature metallic phase of a perovskite nickelate NdNiO3 into an insulating phase with both metastable dipolar polarization and space-charge polarization. We then demonstrate transient negative differential capacitance in thin film capacitors. The space-charge polarization caused by long-range movement and trapping of protons dominates when the electric field exceeds the threshold value. First-principles calculations suggest the polarization originates from the polar structure created by H doping. We find that polarization decays within ~1 second which is an interesting temporal regime for neuromorphic computing hardware design, and we implement the transient characteristics in a neural network to demonstrate unsupervised learning. These discoveries open new avenues for designing ferroelectric materials and electrets using light-ion doping.

Neuromorphic one-shot learning utilizing a phase-transition material.

Design of hardware based on biological principles of neuronal computation and plasticity in the brain is a leading approach to realizing energy- and sample-efficient AI and learning machines. An important factor in selection of the hardware building blocks is the identification of candidate materials with physical properties suitable to emulate the large dynamic ranges and varied timescales of neuronal signaling. Previous work has shown that the all-or-none spiking behavior of neurons can be mimicked by threshold switches utilizing material phase transitions. Here, we demonstrate that devices based on a prototypical metal-insulator-transition material, vanadium dioxide (VO2), can be dynamically controlled to access a continuum of intermediate resistance states. Furthermore, the timescale of their intrinsic relaxation can be configured to match a range of biologically relevant timescales from milliseconds to seconds. We exploit these device properties to emulate three aspects of neuronal analog computation: fast (~1 ms) spiking in a neuronal soma compartment, slow (~100 ms) spiking in a dendritic compartment, and ultraslow (~1 s) biochemical signaling involved in temporal credit assignment for a recently discovered biological mechanism of one-shot learning. Simulations show that an artificial neural network using properties of VO2 devices to control an agent navigating a spatial environment can learn an efficient path to a reward in up to fourfold fewer trials than standard methods. The phase relaxations described in our study may be engineered in a variety of materials and can be controlled by thermal, electrical, or optical stimuli, suggesting further opportunities to emulate biological learning in neuromorphic hardware.

Programming nonreciprocity and harmonic beam steering via a digitally space-time-coded metamaterial antenna.

Recent advancement in digital coding metasurfaces incorporating spatial and temporal modulation has enabled simultaneous control of electromagnetic (EM) waves in both space and frequency domains by manipulating incident EM waves in a transmissive or reflective fashion, resulting in time-reversal asymmetry. Here we show in theory and experiment that a digitally space-time-coded metamaterial (MTM) antenna with spatiotemporal modulation at its unit cell level can be regarded as a radiating counterpart of such digital metasurface, which will enable nonreciprocal EM wave transmission and reception via surface-to-leaky-wave transformation and harmonic frequency generation. Operating in the fast wave (radiation) region, the space-time-coded MTM antenna is tailored in a way such that the propagation constant of each programmable unit cell embedded with varactor diodes can toggle between positive and negative phases, which is done through providing digital sequences by using a field-programmable gate array (FPGA). Owing to the time-varying coding sequence, harmonic frequencies are generated with different main beam directions. Furthermore, the space time modulation of the digitally coded MTM antenna allows for nonreciprocal transmission and reception of EM waves by breaking the time-reversal symmetry, which may enable many applications, such as simultaneous transmitting and receiving, unidirectional transmission, radar sensing, and multiple-input and multiple-output (MIMO) beamformer.

Recent Development of Non-Contact Multi-Target Vital Sign Detection and Location Tracking Based on Metamaterial Leaky Wave Antennas.

Microwave radar sensors have been developed for non-contact monitoring of the health condition and location of targets, which will cause minimal discomfort and eliminate sanitation issues, especially in a pandemic situation. To this end, several radar sensor architectures and algorithms have been proposed to detect multiple targets at different locations. Traditionally, beamforming techniques incorporating phase shifters or mechanical rotors are utilized, which is relatively complex and costly. On the other hand, metamaterial (MTM) leaky wave antennas (LWAs) have a unique property of launching waves of different spectral components in different directions. This feature can be utilized to detect multiple targets at different locations to obtain their healthcare and location information accurately, without complex structure and high cost. To this end, this paper reviews the recent development of MTM LWA-based radar sensor architectures for vital sign detection and location tracking. The experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of MTM vital sign radar compared with different radar sensor architectures.