Spintronics News - Page 1

Scientists from Daegu Gyeongbuk Institute of Science and Technology (DGIST) and Korea Research Institute of Standards and Science (KRISS) have found a new way to control the alignment state of magnetic atoms in an antiferromagnetic material, showing promise for the development of tiny sensors and memory devices.

The researchers' new approach features a controllable exchange bias effect, which enables the asymmetric magnetic actions of devices comprised of complex combination structure of different types of magnetic materials.

Qnami, a Switzerland-based company that develops fundamental new technology using quantum mechanics, has announced the closing of a &4.4 Million USD Series A financing round.

The company intends to use the funds to extend its patented quantum microscope technology into applications enabling the design and production of quantum computers and spintronics devices, plus scaling the launch of the Qnami ProteusQ™, its first commercial Quantum Microscope.

A team of researchers from The University of Groningen and Columbia University have found that 2D spin-logic devices could benefit from magnetic graphene that can efficiently convert charge to spin current, and can transfer this spin-polarization over long distances.

Graphene is known amongst 2D materials for transporting spin information, but cannot generate spin current unless its properties are modified – conventionally cobalt ferromagnetic electrodes are used for injecting and detecting the spin signal.

Researchers at the University of California, Riverside, have used a nanoscale synthetic antiferromagnet to control the interaction between magnons — research that could lead to faster and more energy-efficient computers.

In ferromagnets, electron spins point in the same direction. To make future computer technologies faster and more energy-efficient, spintronics research employs spin dynamics — fluctuations of the electron spins — to process information. Magnons, the quantum-mechanical units of spin fluctuations, interact with each other, leading to nonlinear features of the spin dynamics. Such nonlinearities play a central role in magnetic memory, spin torque oscillators, and many other spintronic applications.

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.