February 2023

Scientists at the North Carolina State University, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and Nanjing Normal University have made use of chiral phonons to transform wasted heat into spin information—without requiring magnetic materials.

This achievement could result in new classes of affordable and energy-efficient spintronic devices for use in applications from computational memory to power grids.

Researchers at MIT have proposed a new approach to making qubits and controlling them to read and write data. The method, which is theoretical at this stage, is based on measuring and controlling the spins of atomic nuclei, using beams of light from two lasers of slightly different colors. 

Nuclear spins have long been recognized as potential building blocks for quantum-based information processing and communications systems, and so have photons, the elementary particles that are discreet packets, or "quanta," of electromagnetic radiation. But coaxing these two quantum objects to work together was difficult because atomic nuclei and photons barely interact, and their natural frequencies differ by six to nine orders of magnitude. In the new process developed by the MIT team, the difference in the frequency of an incoming laser beam matches the transition frequencies of the nuclear spin, nudging the nuclear spin to flip a certain way.

An international research team led by the Helmholtz-Zentrum Dresden-Rossendorf (HZDR) has developed a new method for the efficient coupling of terahertz waves with much shorter wavelengths, so-called spin waves.

The team's experiments, in combination with theoretical models, clarify the fundamental mechanisms of this process previously thought impossible. The results are an important step for the development of novel, energy-saving spin-based technologies for data processing.