Spintronics-Info: the spintronics experts

Researchers from Intel and the University of California in Berkeley developed a new scalable spintronics logic deice, which they magneto-electric spin-orbit (MESO) logic device that offers dramatic improvement over current CMOS technology.

Intel says that MESO based logic, compared to CMOS, will offer a superior switching energy (by a factor of 10 to 30), lower switching voltage (by a factor of 5), an enhanced logic density (by a factor of 5) and ultra low standby power (due to the non-volatility of the spin-based device).

Researchers from the University of Würzburg managed to create a molecular spintronics switch, using a manganese phthalocyanine molecule. The researchers succeeded in manipulating this molecule using a special deposit and an electrical field to permanently take on two different states.

This molecule cannot be normally switched, but the researchers managed to develop the switch by placing the molecule on metallic surface built from silver and bismuth atoms.

Researchers from MIT and the Brookhaven National Laboratory have demonstrated how the magnetic properties of thin-film materials can be controlled be using electrically-controlled hydrogen ions.

The researchers say that this new mechanism is much faster and has many advantages over the current method using larger oxygen ions.The researchers have also demonstrated that the process produces no degradation of the material after more than 2,000 cycles. As the hydrogen ions are smaller, they can easily pass through metal layers, which allows to control properties of layers deep in a device that couldn't be controlled in any other way.

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: