March 2025

Researchers at the University of California San Diego have developed a new computational approach to accurately model and predict complex spin structures called helimagnetic spin structures, using quantum mechanics calculations. 

“The helical spin structures in two-dimensional layered materials have been experimentally observed for over 40 years. It has been a longstanding challenge to predict them with precision,” said Kesong Yang, professor in the Aiiso Yufeng Li Family Department of Chemical and Nano Engineering at the UC San Diego Jacobs School of Engineering and senior author of the study. “The helical period in the layered compound extends up to 48 nanometers, making it extremely difficult to accurately calculate all the electron and spin interactions at this scale.”

The University of California, Riverside, according to reports, has been awarded nearly $4 million through the UC National Laboratory Fees Research Program to lead a major research initiative in antiferromagnetic spintronics. Over the next three years, the project will explore how antiferromagnetic materials can be used to push the boundaries of modern microelectronics.

“The semiconductor microelectronics industry is looking for new materials, new phenomena, and new mechanisms to sustain technological advances,” said Jing Shi, a distinguished professor of physics and astronomy at UCR and the award’s principal investigator. “With co-principal investigators at UC San Diego, UC Davis, UCLA, and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, we aim to cement the University of California’s leadership in this area and obtain extramural center and group funding in the near future.”

Researchers from Beihang University and Freie Universität Berlin have developed a spintronic THz emitter with a microscale stripe pattern that enables the modulation of chirality during THz wave generation. Unlike traditional THz sources that rely on external optical components, this emitter incorporates polarization tuning directly into its design, streamlining the technology and enhancing its capabilities.

The emitter comprises thin-film layers of tungsten, cobalt-iron-boron, and platinum. When exposed to ultrafast laser pulses, the material generates a spin current, which is converted into an electrical charge through the inverse spin Hall effect.

The data storage capacity of multi-terabyte hard drives is several million megabytes, but their data transfer rates are only a few hundred megabytes per second, due to their reliance on tiny magnetic structures. The development of memory devices that operate at picosecond timescales could speed data transfer and improve access to digital information. However, ultrafast control of magnetization states in magnetically ordered systems, like hard drives, is a challenge.

Researchers from Helmholtz-Zentrum Dresden-Rossendorf (HZDR) and TU Dortmund University have attempted to remove speed restrictions in hard drives, by using short current pulses and spintronic effects. Instead of electrical pulses, the team used ultrashort terahertz (THz) light pulses to enable the readout of magnetic structures in just picoseconds.

Researchers from Eindhoven University of Technology, University of Cambridge, Huazhong University of Science and Technology, AMOLF and Diamond Light Source Ltd have created an organic semiconductor that forces electrons to move in a spiral pattern, which could improve the efficiency of OLED displays or power next-generation computing technologies such as spintronics and quantum computing.

The semiconductor they developed emits circularly polarized light—meaning the light carries information about the ‘left or right-handedness’ of electrons. The internal structure of most inorganic semiconductors, like silicon, is symmetrical, meaning electrons move through them without any preferred direction. But in nature, molecules often have a chiral (left- or right-handed) structure. Chirality plays an important role in biological processes like DNA formation, but it is a difficult phenomenon to harness and control in electronics.

UC Riverside has received a Collaborative Research and Training Award of nearly $4 million from the UC National Laboratory Fees Research Program to explore how antiferromagnetic spintronics can be used to advantage in advanced memory and computing. The three-year project aims to advance microelectronics using antiferromagnetic materials, an ultrafast spin-based technology.

“The semiconductor microelectronics industry is looking for new materials, new phenomena, and new mechanisms to sustain technological advances,” said Jing Shi, a distinguished professor of physics and astronomy at UCR and the award’s principal investigator. “With co-principal investigators at UC San Diego, UC Davis, UCLA, and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, we aim to cement the University of California’s leadership in this area and obtain extramural center and group funding in the near future.”

Researchers at the National Graphene Institute at the University of Manchester have announced milestone in the field of quantum electronics with their latest work on spin injection to graphene. The team reported ballistic injection of spin polarized carriers via one-dimensional contacts between magnetic nanowires and a high mobility graphene channel. 

The nanowire-graphene interface defines an effective constriction that confines charge carriers over a length scale smaller than that of their mean free path. This is evidenced by the observation of quantized conductance through the contacts with no applied magnetic field and a transition into the quantum Hall regime with increasing field strength. These effects occur in the absence of any constriction in the graphene itself and occur across several devices with transmission probability in the range T = 0.08 − 0.30.