Spintronics-Info: the spintronics experts

The US National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and its partners in the US Nanoelectronic Computing Research (nCORE) consortium have awarded $10.3 million over four years to establish a spintronics research center in Mineesota.

The Center for Spintronic Materials in Advanced Information Technologies (SMART) will be led by and housed at the University of Minnesota Twin Cities and will include researchers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Pennsylvania State University, Georgetown University and the University of Maryland.

Researchers from Europe developed heterostructures built from graphene and topological insulators and have shown the strong tunability and suppression of the spin signal and spin lifetime in these structures.

Associate Professor Saroj Prasad Dash from Chalmers University of Technology explains that the advantage of using heterostructures built from two Dirac materials is tha graphene in proximity with topological insulators still supports spin transport, and concurrently acquires a strong spin–orbit coupling.

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.