Financial

A new $7.5 million project, led by the University of Michigan, will embrace lines of shifted atoms, or dislocations, in electronic materials (which have long been considered detrimental due to their tendency to impede the flow of electricity), and use them to possibly enable faster and more efficient information processing.

Funded by the Department of Defense, the project aims to understand how dislocations could be used as nano-pipelines to channel electrons while manipulating their spins. The project also involves researchers from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.

A joint Collaborative Research Centre between Leipzig University and Chemnitz University of Technology will receive multi-million funding. The Collaborative Research Centre, to be known as HYP*MOL, will bring together 29 professors and early career researchers from both universities, as well as other external research partners, to study electron and nuclear spin hyperpolarization in molecular systems.

“This funding is both a cause for celebration and a great incentive for everyone involved,” says Professor Eva Inés Obergfell, Rector of Leipzig University. “Hyperpolarization is an exciting and rapidly evolving field of research. I believe that our research team will contribute new insights that will be appreciated at an international level.” Leipzig University is now involved in 16 Collaborative Research Centres and represents five of them. “This is something to be proud of and should encourage us to submit more applications.”

A research team from the Technical University of Kaiserslautern (TUK) has been awarded a Consolidator Grant from the European Research Council (ERC) to develop spintronic devices.

Professor Dr. Mathias Weiler, lead of the study, will receive €2 million over the next five years. Scientists are working on spin waves and new spintronic devices that could drastically accelerate the storage, processing, and transmission of information.

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 research team at NTU’s School of Physical and Mathematical Sciences and School of Materials Science and Engineering, led by Associate Professor Gao Weibo, together with colleagues from the Singapore University of Technology and Design, has won substantial funding from Singapore’s National Research Foundation to develop high-performance spintronics devices.

The five-year programme, called “The next generation of spintronics with 2D heterostructures”, aims to develop spintronics devices based on next-generation van der Waals materials, which are strongly bonded two-dimensional (2D) layers of materials that are bound in the third dimension through weaker van der Waals forces.

The European Research Council (ERC) granted a €1.9 million new project to Prof. Can Onur Avci, in the field of magnetic insulators for spintronics devices. Prof. Aci will move to ICMAB and be integrated at the ICMAB Research Line 3 (RL3) “Oxides for new generation electronics”. The activities of this research center span from multiferroics, flexoelectric materials oxide photonics and spintronics to ferroelectric memory arrays and GHz-THz magnetoelectrics.

The awarded project is called MAGNEPIC, or “Magnetic Insulators: An Enabling Platform for Innovative Spintronic Concepts”. The project full goal is to study magnetic insulators to develop novel device concepts and explore emerging physical phenomena that could be useful for future spintronics research and applications.

The european Graphene Flagship project has announced 16 newly-funded graphene FLAG-ERA projects. These projects which will become Partnering Projects of the Graphene Flagship – receiving around €11 million in funding overall.

Two of these projects will investigate the promising properties of graphene for spintronics. The SOgraphMEM project will test specific materials for a novel branch of spintronics called spin-orbitronics, while the DIMAG project will fabricate new layered magnetic materials with optimal characteristics for spintronics applications.

Researchers from Aarhus University in Denmark received a EUR 4.4 million grant from the EU FET to develop novel spintronics-based AI hardware. The researcher say that their suggested design can end up having 100,000 times the performance of the state-of-the-art AI systems of today.

The project, called SpinAge, will revolve around a neuromorphic computer system (NCS) design that is unique, scalable and highly energy efficient (the researchers estimate that the new design will be more efficient than current designs by at least a factor of 100). The synaptic neurons in this system will be based on spintronics technology.

Dr. Wei Zhang, an assistant professor of physics at Oakland University, has earned the National Science Foundation’s Faculty Early Career Development Program Award and a $500,000 grant over five years to study quantum spintronics.

Quantum spintronics, a relatively new field, studies how a material’s quantum properties (either natural or engineered) could be used to advance future spintronics devices. The grant funding will help facilitate the development of new quantum spintronic laboratory modules at the university, as well as outreach and education activities.

The Sofja Kovalevskaja Award, Germany's most highly-endowned research award for early-research scientists, went this year to Dr Angelo Di Bernardo from Cambridge University. Dr. Angelo was awarded with 1.65 million Euros and will move to the University of Konstant in which he will establish a research hub in the field of superconducting spintronics.

Dr. Angelo's project that won the award is dealing with superconducting spintronics with oxides and 2D materials.