Phys.org  May 9, 2022 A team of researchers in the US (Brookhaven National Laboratory, Duke University, Oak Ridge National Laboratory) captured the hidden trajectory of atomic motion of vanadium dioxide (VO2) as it transitioned from an insulator to a metal in response to a pulse of light. Vanadium dioxide exhibits an insulator-metal transition near room temperature in which a small voltage or current can produce a large change in resistivity with switching that can mimic the behavior of both neurons and synapses. Those are the signals produced by electrons scattering off the atoms of the vanadium dioxide sample as atoms […]