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Computer Chip
Remember last summer when your kids momentarily thought they’d struck it rich panning for gold at the Black Hills Mining Museum, only to have the docent break their little hearts by telling them the “gold” the museum stocks in its crick is, in fact, worthless fool’s gold? Well, have them fetch their little burlap sacks of iron pyrite, because it turns out that guy dressed like an 1840s prospector couldn’t have been more wrong.
Yep. It just so happens that fool’s gold might not be so foolish after all, thanks to the visionary work of a group of scientists at the University of Minnesota who think iron pyrite is, well, the compound of the future.
To understand why, you need look no further than a former element of the future, silicon. You know, the element we use to build the insides of computers and smartphones, solar cells in solar panels, and so much more. The element that begins its life as quartz but, after an extreme amount of energy-intensive refining, becomes a semiconductor without rival. That is, until now.
“Engineers simply can’t make chips run faster, because they’re so small and making so much heat already,” explains Chris Leighton, a University of Minnesota Distinguished McKnight University Professor in the Department of Chemical Engineering and Materials Science, of the limitations of silicon. “It’s an urgent situation if we want the new generation of iPod or whatever to be better and faster, as we’ve been accustomed to. The speed of computing has been flat for years, and we need new fundamental science if we want to do computing faster.”
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Fool's Gold, Iron Pyrite
Iron pyrite: No longer just a worthless but excellent-looking gold substitute.
Fundamental science is getting rid of silicon in solar panels and replacing it with fool’s gold, according to Leighton, who has been working in the fields of both quantum materials and complex oxides for many years and only recently decided to take a step back and see what scientific dots he could connect between quantum materials and iron pyrite. When he did, he realized that if one could blanket a few nanometers of iron pyrite with a droplet of ionic liquid, and then apply extremely low voltage, the fool’s gold would become magnetic until the voltage was stopped. Might not sound like a big deal to you, but in scientific circles, magnetizing a nonmagnetic object is a huge deal. In fact, Leighton’s discovery made big international science news—“Who’s the fool now?” asked Australian science magazine Cosmos—and it is speculated that it might be not just big science news but a full-on materials science revolution.
Why? For starters, iron pyrite could remove high heat from the world of computing—especially from data centers and server farms. Another big benefit? Silicon is quite energy intensive to make and purify, with some estimates calculating that the equivalent of around three and a half pounds of fossil fuels are used per silicon chip.
Oh, and it also turns out that silicon is actually a terrible material to use to build solar panel cells.
“Pyrite absorbs light 1,000 times better than silicon,” says Leighton. “And it’s 100 times cheaper than the next cheapest thing we can make solar panels out of.”
On top of that, the things you need to manufacture fool’s gold are iron, which is abundant, and sulfur, which many of the world’s oil refineries are surrounded by hills of, since it’s a waste byproduct of oil production.
“What most people probably don’t know about silicon is that the reason we use it for everything is because it’s simply one of the best-understood materials on the planet,” Leighton adds. “Billions of dollars, hundreds of companies are wrapped into silicon. Even when it’s a square peg in a round hole, you end up using silicon because we have just been using it for so long.”
Fools. If Leighton is right, what scientists needed to be doing all along was panning for iron pyrite in the Black Hills next to your kid.
