Researcher Michel de Jong of the NanoElectronics group (MESA+) in the University of Twente (Netherlands) received a €1.5 million grant from the European Research Council to fund his Spintronics work (this is his second ERC grant). Michel de Jong is focusing on organic materials, in particular in Buckyballs (spherical C60 molecules held together by weak bonds) sandwiched between two magnetic materials.

Michel explains that these molecules have very little effect on electron spin, which is a great advantage as it enables them to store spin information for much longer periods of time than silicon. Buckyballs have also been used to create Graphene Quantum Dots.

Today we updated our logo for Spintronics-Info, here's the new design:

We hope you like it. We also think that it removes some clutter and makes our page easier on the eyes...

UCLA has received a $8.4 million grant from DARPA to research ultra-low-power, non-volatile logic technologies. This is the same DARPA project that also awarded a contract to Grandis on the same subject a couple of weeks ago.

The UCLA researchers are aiming to develop a prototype non-volatile logic circuit, which could lead to the development of new classes of ultra–low-power, high-performance electronics. The research program will explore three technical areas: the behavior of nanoscale magnetic materials; the fabrication and testing of a non-volatile logic circuit; and the development of novel circuits and circuit-design tools.

The project will be managed at UCLA by research associate Pedram Khalili and will be led under principal investigators Kang Wang and Alex Khitun. It will involved researchers from UCLA, UC Irvine, Yale University and the University of Massachusetts.

Dr. Amos Sharoni, an Israeli researcher from Bar-Ilan University is working to make existing batteries last 10 times longer and existing processors work 10 times faster using Spintronics.

Spintronics is the basis of electrical systems. We manipulate electronics to give us power that translates into functions like playing a song. "It's all electrons. They have a charge. There is a battery with a plus-minus. But the electrons have another property - their spin, a small magnetic field, pointing up or down," he explains.

"None of the electronics today use this spin property to do anything," says Sharoni. "It's wasted potential. The reason is because even the smallest element of the device is big, and due to this, you lose all the spin information you have. It gets messy. In regular devices - you just lose it - it's like trying to look through fog."

Spintronics-Info was upgraded today (if anyone is interested, we upgraded to Drupal 6.x from 5.8) Most of the changes are infrastructure related so you won't notice much, but hopefully the site should be faster now, more stable and more secure.

If you do find any bugs, glitches or you have any comments, please let us know!

We're happy to announce a new addition to the Metalgrass site network: Graphene-Info. Graphene is a sheet, one-atom-thick of carbon atom, in a honeycomb crystal lattice. If you use many layers of graphene, stacked one on top of the other, you’ll get Graphite. Graphene has many uses - Spintronics, sensors, ICs (for example a transparent backplane for OLEDs), ultra-capacitors and more.

We hope you'll enjoy the new site...

We have updated our site's design... with a much cleaner look. Hopefully this will make reading and finding information easier.

I'd love to hear your comments on the new look!

If you're interesting in Spintronics, and like our site, you might be happy to know that we now have a facebook page. You may join these and get updates via your Facebook account.

We're happy spreading Spintronics news in whatever way we can...

Update: the Toolbar and the Widget are no longer available

We're always looking for ways to make Spintronics news and resources more easily accessible. We now have two new exciting tools - a toolbar and a widget.

• The Spintronics toolbar: A free toolbar for your browser (Firefox or explorer) with the latest Spintronics news and links. It also includes a radio, web-search, weather, e-mail notifier, and more. Click here to install it.
• A widget: Our widget displays the latest Spintronics news. It can easily be imported to your blog or web page, or favorite start page (such as iGoogle or netvibes). Click here to get it.

We hope these new tools will be useful to our readers. If you can think of others ways you want to access Spintronics-Info, please let us know...

I'm happy to announce that we upgraded our infrastructure from Drupal 4.7.4 to Drupal 5.8. As a reader you will not find many differences, but hopefully it will prove a more stable, safe and quick system.

If you do find any bugs or glitches, please let us know...