spintronics tagged posts

Physicists Manipulate Magnetism with Light

Carina Belvin (left) and Edoardo Baldini work in the MIT lab of Professor Nuh Gedik.
Photo Credit: Tianchuang Luo

With the help of a “playground” they created for observing exotic physics, MIT scientists and colleagues have not only found a new way to manipulate magnetism in a material with light but have also realized a rare form of matter. The former could lead to applications including computer memory storage devices that can read or write information in a much faster way, while the latter introduces new physics.

A solid material is composed of different types of elementary particles, such as protons and neutrons. Also ubiquitous in such materials are “quasiparticles” that the public is less familiar with...

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New Data-Decoding approach could lead to Faster, Smaller Digital Tech

Photo-illustration by Craig Chandler | University Communication
Evgeny Tsymbal “holds” a rendering of the atomic structure found in ruthenium oxide, a material whose properties could point the way to faster digital devices packed with more memory.

Most scientists would blanch at being labeled a spin doctor. But when it comes to Evgeny Tsymbal, Ding-Fu Shao and their colleagues, the lab coat fits.

The University of Nebraska–Lincoln physicists have charged to the forefront of spintronics, a next-gen class of data storage and processing poised to complement the digital electronics that have ruled the realm of high tech for decades.

Ahead of that future, though, loom nanoscale obstacles whose size belies their difficulty...

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Green Information Technologies: Superconductivity meets Spintronics

Credit: CC0 Public Domain

When two superconducting regions are separated by a strip of non-superconducting material, a special quantum effect can occur, coupling both regions: The Josephson effect. If the spacer material is a half-metal ferromagnet novel implications for spintronic applications arise. An international team has now for the first time designed a material system that exhibits an unusually long-range Josephson effect: Here, regions of superconducting YBa2Cu3O7 are separated by a region of half-metallic, ferromagnetic manganite (La2/3Sr1/3MnO3) one micron wide.

With the help of magneto-transport measurements, the researchers were able to demonstrate the presence of a supercurrent circulating through the manganite — this supercurrent is arising from the superconducting co...

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New Nanoscale Device for Spin Technology

A green laser light shining on a sample stage between two magnets
Magneto-optical microscope used for imaging spin waves in a Fabry-Pérot resonator

Spin waves could unlock the next generation of computer technology, a new component allows physicists to control them. Researchers at Aalto University have developed a new device for spintronics. The results have been published in the journal Nature Communications, and mark a step towards the goal of using spintronics to make computer chips and devices for data processing and communication technology that are small and powerful.

Traditional electronics uses electrical charge to carry out computations that power most of our day-to-day technology...

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