Advance in energy storage could speed up development of next-gen electronics

Takayoshi Sasaki and colleagues point out that many recent improvements have already downsized capacitors significantly. But current technology has almost reached its limit in terms of materials and processing, which in turn limits the performance that manufacturers can achieve. In response, researchers have gone to the nanoscale, but "nanocapacitors" are not easy to make. They require harsh, difficult-to-use methods and even then, they may not work that well. So Sasaki's team developed an easier approach, and they use it to make high-performance "ultrathin" capacitors.

The researchers found that they could use gentle techniques and mild conditions to create a sandwich consisting of layers of two different types of oxide nanosheets to produce an ultrathin capacitor. In addition, the new capacitor has a capacitance density about 2,000 times higher than that of commercially available products. They say that, in the future, the ultrathin capacitors could be used in printed circuit boards and in memory storage devices, for example.