Spintronics-Info: the spintronics experts

Researchers from MIT, the Max-Born Institute, Technische Universität Berlin and the Deutsches Elektronen-Synchrotron (DESY) say ferrimagnets-based spintronics devices could be faster than ferromagnets ones.

Ferromagnets are traditional magnets - such as iron. Ferrimagnets are materials that have two types of ions with magnetic moments that are not equal - and are also polarized in opposite directions.Using these two ion types could be used, according to the researchers, to create smaller bits in magnetic memory as these will allow faster domain wall dynamics to occur.

The US DARPA agency has published an interesting video that explains about its Spintronics research efforts, with current and format program managers and DARPA-funded industry researchers describe key historical events and DARPA research goals:

Xiaoshan Xu, assistant physics and astronomy professor at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln (UNL), was awarded with $750,000 from the US Department of Energy (DoE) to advance his spintronics research.

The main target of Prof. Xu's research is to investigate how organic spintronics works, and hopefully advance organic spintronics materials and devices.

Researchers from the Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz, in cooperation with Utrecht University and the Center for Quantum Spintronics (QuSpin) at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU), demonstrated that the antiferromagnetic material iron oxide is a promising magnon spintronics material.

Iron oxide is a cheap material (it is the main material in rusted iron) that was shown to be able to carry magnon over long distances, with low access heat. For their demonstration, the researchers used used platinum wires on top of the insulating iron oxide. An electric current was introduced which led to the creation of magnons in the iron oxide.

Researchers from the University of Minnesota have managed to deposit Bismuth Selenide (Bi₂Se₃) films using a simple sputtering technique.

Bismuth Selenide is topological insulator and a promising material for spintronics applications including MRAM devices. The material produced in this research featured a high spin torque at room temperatures.

Researchers from the Tokyo Institute of Technology have developed a new thin film material made from bismuth-antimony (BiSb) that is a topological insulator that simultaneously achieves a colossal spin Hall effect and high electrical conductivity.

This material could be used as the basis of spin-orbit torque MRAM (SOT-MRAM). SOT-MRAM SOT-MRAM can overcome the limitation of spin-transfer torque in MRAM memories - and provide a much faster, denser and much more efficient memory technology. Up until now, though, no suitable material that features both high electrical conductivity and a high spin hall effect was developed.

Researchers from the University of Lorraine in France report that following a comprehensive characterization of multilayers of cobalt (Co) and nickel (Ni), the material holds great promise for memory applications based on spin transfer torque (STT-MRAM).

It was already shown before that Co/Ni multilayers have very good properties for spintronics applications, but up until now it wasn't clear if the films have a sufficiently large intrinsic spin polarization, which is necessary to create and maintain spin-polarized currents in spintronic devices. It was now shown that the films have a spin polarization of about 90% - which is similar to the best spintronic materials.