Question: what kind of new materials could improve the future smartphone and how

Kerry O'Shea answered on 14 Nov 2014:

The types of materials I’m looking at have interesting electrical and magnetic properties. For example, you may know about conductors and insulators, I’m looking at materials known as half metals, which means we can use an extra property of the electrons called the spin.
Another unique property is that their electrical resistance changes when a magnetic field is applied. There are even more interesting things when different materials are placed next to each other and couple together.
Typically data is stored in binary format (e.g. bit 0 or 1). With new materials, this could be increased to 4 (e.g. bit 0, 1, 2 and 3). This means that for the same size of device we could get double the benefits.
I don’t work on smartphones directly, I’m interested in the physics underlying the materials inside, I’ll leave that up to manufacturers to work out!