"MATERIALS: Science learns why size matters in capacitors"

If you look at the surface-mounted components on a typical printed-circuit board, the large ones are likely to be the capacitors. For reasons that were not previously verified, the smaller a capacitor gets, the less capacitance it exhibits, often necessitating the use of larger capacitors to achieve the desired capacitance. Now a materials science group at the University of California, Santa Barbara claims to have figured out why, and has concluded that using platinum or gold electrodes can allow a capacitor's depolarization layer's thickness to be reduced by a factor of four.
Text: http://www.eetimes.com/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=193303453