December 2016

Professor Amnon Aharony from Israel's Ben Gurion University gave a lecture at Brazil's IIP, discussing his research into spin-orbit interactions, time reversal symmetry and spin filtering. The full lecture can be seen in the video below:

Researchers from MIT and the Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz (JGU) achieved the billion-fold reproducible motion of skyrmions (special spin structures) between different positions. The researchers say that this kind of process is needed to produce magnetic shift registers - and so this is a critical step towards skyrmions applications in spintronics devices.

Using specially design thin film structures (asymmetric multilayer devices) that exhibit broken inversion symmetry that stabilize the skyrmions. In such structures, skyrmions have a unique stability - which makes them compelling for such spintronic devices. The researchers say that those skyrmions, that can be shifted by electrical currents and move relatively undisturbed through the track, are very promising to make racetrack devices.

2016 is pretty much over - and this has been another year of interesting year for spintronics researchers.

Here are the top 10 stories posted on Spintronics-Info in 2016, ranked by popularity (i.e. how many people read the story):

• Researchers finally explain ferromagnetism in Mn-doped GaAs (Jun 8)
• C-SPIN researchers discuss topological insulators (Aug 23)
• Will antiferromagnetic pave the way to spintronics memory? (May 13)
• Intel: we'll have to adopt fundamentally new transistor technologies in 4-5 years, Spintronics is a leading candidate (Feb 5)
• Researchers create a field-effect light switch - on the way to optical spintronics (Aug 19)
• Proximity-induced magnetism promising for room-temperature spintronics (May 10)
• Laser pulses can be used to create strong spin currents (Jun 2)
• NIST published a video-lecture about spin current (Jun 3)
• Researchers manage to switch magnetic moments in an insulator (Sep 5)
• Video gives a nice introduction to spintronics and spin lifetime (Sep 19)

Researchers from the US Naval Research Laboratory (NRL) demonstrated metallic spin filtering at room temperatures, using a ferromagnet-graphene-ferromagnet thin film junction device.

Spin filtering has been theoretically predicted, and previously seen only for high-resistance structures at cryogenic temperatures. This is the first time that someone demonstrated the effect in room temperatures, and with very low resistance in arrays of multiple devices.

Researchers at Tohoku University demonstrated a spintronics-based artificial intelligence (AI) device. The researchers developed an artificial neural network using micro-scale magnetic spintronic device.

The researchers say that this spintronic device is capable of memorizing arbitral values between 0 and 1 in an analogue manner unlike the conventional magnetic devices, and thus perform the learning function, which is served by synapses in the brain. This is still an early stage (the researchers call this a proof-of-concept demo) but spintronics has a high potential to enable ultra low-power and fast neural-network devices.

2016 will soon come to an end, and we are getting ready to summarize another interesting spintronics year. One year ago we posted the top spintronics stories in 2015, and you can see the list below again:

• Researchers show SiC is a promising spintronics material
• Researchers created a zero-moment spin-polarized half metal for the first time
• Korean researchers managed to create a flexible film suitable for spintronics applications
• A new method introduces magnetism to graphene while preserving its electronics properties
• Spin-based memory cells can be trained to learn like a brain synapse
• Spin current shown to travel over half a micrometer in a thin doped germanium film 
• Singapore allocates $3.7 million to support Spintronics research projects
• Researchers develop new promising low-symmetry crystal for spintronics applications
• Researchers discover that pure-spin current is possible in insulators 
• EU's Graphene Flagship is looking for a partner company for spintronics research

What will be the most popular spintronics stories in 2016? We will soon post our yearly review, stay tuned!

Professor Davide Bossini, from the Gutensberg University in Germany, presented a lecture titled "Towards the Ultimate Limits of Spintronics: Ultrafast Optical Control of Magnetism". You can view the entire lecture below: