Communications of the ACM
A New Spin on Electronics
A team of scientists from Munich and Kyoto is now demonstrating how to use an electrons spin, instead of its charge, to transmit information.
Credit: Christoph Hohmann/NIM
Researchers at the Technical University of Munich in Germany and Kyoto University in Japan have successfully demonstrated the production, transport, and detection of electronic spin information at room temperature, using the boundary layer between lanthanum-aluminate and strontium-titanate.
Spin electronics have the potential to replace semiconductors as the underlying technology in computers and mobile devices.
The researchers' system features an extremely thin, electrically conducting layer that forms where the two non-conducting materials interface as a two-dimensional electron gas that conveys both spin and charge. A magnetic contact addresses the spin transfer challenge, and the gas then transports the spin information to a non-magnetic contact. The non-magnetic contact senses the spin transport via spin absorption, accumulating an electric potential. By measuring this potential, the researchers were able to systematically probe the transport of spin and show the feasibility of spanning distances up to 100 times larger than the distance of modern transistors.
From Technical University of Munich (Germany)
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Abstracts Copyright © 2017 Information Inc., Bethesda, Maryland, USA
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