Spintronics-Info: the spintronics experts

Researchers at Aalto University have developed a new device for spintronics, which could be seen as a step towards using spintronics to make computer chips and devices for data processing and communication technology.

Schematic of the experimental geometry. Image from article

"If you use spin waves, it's transfer of spin, you don't move charge, so you don't create heating," says Professor Sebastiaan van Dijken, who leads the group that wrote the paper. The device the team made is a Fabry-Pérot resonator, a well-known tool in optics for creating beams of light with a tightly controlled wavelength. The spin-wave version made by the researchers in this work allows them to control and filter waves of spin in devices that are only a few hundreds of nanometres across.

A team of researchers from Sweden, Finland and Japan have designed a semiconductor component in which information can be efficiently exchanged between electron spin and light at room temperature and above.

Developments in spintronics in recent decades have been based on the use of metals, and these have been highly significant for the possibility of storing large amounts of data. There would, however, be several advantages in using spintronics based on semiconductors, in the same way that semiconductors form the backbone of today's electronics and photonics.

Recent studies have suggested that 2D skyrmions could be the genesis of a 3D spin pattern called hopfions, but no one had been able to experimentally prove that magnetic hopfions exist on the nanoscale. Now, a team of researchers co-led by Berkeley Lab reported the first demonstration and observation of 3D hopfions emerging from skyrmions at the nanoscale in a magnetic system.

Artist’s drawing of characteristic 3D spin texture of a magnetic hopfion. Berkeley Lab scientists have created and observed 3D hopfions. Credit: Peter Fischer and Frances Hellman/Berkeley Lab (from Phys.org)

The researchers say that their discovery is a major step forward in realizing high-density, high-speed, low-power, yet ultrastable magnetic memory devices that exploit the intrinsic power of electron spin.

A research team from the Max Planck Institute for the Structure and Dynamics of Matter (MPSD), Tianjin University in China and Tohoku University in Japan recently reported that, when driven out of equilibrium by magnetic fields, a universal Doppler effect limits the maximal spin current in magnetic insulators.

This finding is a surprising analogy to what happens in superconductors driven by electric fields and could provide a fundamental design principle for future nano-devices with computing science and power applications.

Researchers from Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL), University of California and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory have discovered the existence of elusive spin dynamics in quantum mechanical systems.

The team successfully simulated and measured spins - magnetic particles, which can exhibit a motion known as Kardar-Parisi-Zhang in solid materials at varying temperatures. Up until now, scientists have only found evidence of the spin dynamics in soft matter and other classical materials.

Researchers used the Advanced Photon Source (APS), a U.S. Department of Energy Office of Science User Facility at DOE’s Argonne National Laboratory, to study ways to manipulate electron spins and develop new materials for spintronics. The research team, led by Chang-Beom Eom at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, designed a new material that has three times the storage density and uses much less power than other spintronics devices.

Not many of these types of materials exist, especially ones that work at room temperature like this one. If the new material can be perfected, it could aid in the creation of more efficient electronic devices with less tendency to overheat. This is particularly important for advancing the development of low-power computing and fast magnetic memory.

Tohoku University researchers have developed a technology for the nanosecond operation of the spintronics-based probabilistic bit (p-bit) - referred to as the "poor man's quantum bit" (q-bit).

The late physicist R.P. Feynman envisioned a probabilistic computer: a computer that is capable of dealing with probabilities at scale to enable efficient computing. "Using spintronics, our latest technology made the first step in realizing Feynman's vision," said Shun Kanai, professor at the Research Institute of Electrical Communication at Tohoku University and lead author of the study.