Slashdot Mirror
More on Spintronics
segment writes "'We have discovered the equivalent of a new 'Ohm's Law' for spintronics - the emerging science of manipulating the spin of electrons for useful purposes,' says Shoucheng Zhang, a physics professor at Stanford. 'Unlike the Ohm's Law for electronics, the new 'Ohm's Law' that we've discovered says that the spin of the electron can be transported without any loss of energy, or dissipation. Furthermore, this effect occurs at room temperature in materials already widely used in the semiconductor industry, such as gallium arsenide.'"
10000010 00011011 01100001 00110000 01011010 10001110 00000101 10000111
01100110 01101011 11011011 10010000 11101101 01001000 11100000 10110010
11010011 10000000 01001000 10000111 10000101 11000001 11100000 11100001
10100101 00111011 00000100 10000111 01101011 01000100 01110001 01101111
11100110 11111110 11000111 01101000 00110010 01100101 00000011 10001101
00111110 10111000 00011010 11011110 00001101 00110001 10010001 11000100
11110111 10101100 10000000 00011011 11010010 10101100 00100011 01101011
11111100 01011110 01000110 00001001 00101110 00001101 01101110 01111011
10110001 00110111 10001010 00110011 11001000 10100011 11000000 00100010
00110001 11100110 10011011 00100101 01010010 11000111 00101110 01010101
10101001 00101110 11110111 11101010 10101011 01001010 10010010 01101101
00101000 11001000 00101111 11000000 11011100 10000010 00001111 10101110
10110011 11101100 11111000 11111001 11001010 01010110 10010100 10010111
00110100 11100111 11010000 10101100 11100010 10111000 11110010 11000111
01111011 11100101 01010011 11111101 11111101 01111001 11000101 00101000
11010101 01111011 00010001 10101001 01000010 01011001 01010010 11000000
00010000 10011101 11010111 00000010 10100011 01010011 10011110 00011100
10110001 11111000 01001110 10000001 01001110 10101101 10001101 10100001
10011011 10110100 11111100 01000011 11110110 00011111 00101010 00100111
11100000 11001011 00110010 01000011 10001000 10101010 11110111 00111011
10010010 10011100 10110110 10011010 10010101 10101100 11101111 00101101
00111000 11011101 10000000 00010110 10100000 10100110 00011110 11111010
01101010 01000000 01010110 11010000 10101001 11000001 00111111 00001011
11100111 11111010 10001111 10101001 01010110 00101010 11110111 01011011
01010011 00000010 10110101 00100001 01010001 11100110 11111001 00100011
00110011 11100011 01001111 01111000 00100110 00010000 01101111 01001001
11101010 00011010 01011000 11000001 00010010 01101001 10101111 11000100
01111101 11110110 01010111 10001001 00110010 11111111 11110100 01101011
00110101 10010011 00001100 11001010 11111111 10010011 00100111 01000000
10000010 00011010 01101001 10000000 00010010 00000110 10010000 00000000
00111100 00000010 01100010 11000011 01111110 10000100 00101101 10110110
00111011 10000111 00000100 10000010 00001101 10100101 00110010 00111110
00010011 00100010 11111010 11110110 10001101 00000100 11011000 01101100
10001001 00010100 01000011 10000110 01110111 10111001 11010101 11001001
01111010 11101100 01101101 11010111 10011110 00010010 10011101 00010001
01100001 11001011 10101011 10111001 01000011 01001000 10101000 11111101
01101111 00000010 11101011 11111111 11100110 00100111 01000010 10100101
10101001 01101110 01110010 11110111 10110100 10000101 10101010 01110010
01110101 10100100 00111001 10110110 01101110 11000010 11101001 11100000
11100111 00100000 01110000 10001001 01101101 10011100 10010100 00110001
01110010 10101000 10111100 10001110 01101101 11100001 00110110 10111101
10100010 01000010 11111010 00111110 10011111 01000101 01010100 10110010
10010100 01101110 11100100 00110001 11100001 00001111 11001111 00100001
00110110 11011001 10111001 00100110 00001111 10100101 10010101 01000011
10101101 00001101 01001100 10101010 00111001 00100010 10111010 00101111
10011110 10001011 11101000 01000010 10101111 00011000 00000100 00110110
10011011 01100000 11101110 10000010 11100011 01010110 10101001 00001101
00011100 10010010 11111101 01110010 10001101 00100110 00010001 11111111
00111010 00100000 00110100 11111011 01000110 01000011 10011111 10000110
01100001 11001110 00011010 00100000 01111000 00010010 10011111 00011001
01010000 00001000 00101101 10011111 00011101 00011011 11101110 00110110
10010000 01011000 11101001 01101001 01101111 10101001 10001011 00010000
11100011 01100001 01110001 10111100 01101001 10100010 11100010 01110010
01000001 10111010 11010111 00000001 11011001 01100111 10101111 01000010
01101101 11100
I am teh king.
1st?
so... they've figured out how to alter the path of electrons outside of a circuit. I can see how that could be useful, but how likely is this to be practical to real electronics?
In Soviet Russia, the electron spins you
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
I'm pretty sure someone pulled that word out of his snide arse.
-Peter
Man it seems like that stuff NEVER goes away. Haven't we invented 10 technologies to get rid of that stuff already?
Wouldn't the free manipulation of information be sorta, I dunno, against the laws of thermodynamics?
oops, the secret's out now.
dawnlevy@stanford.edu
650-725-1944
Stanford University
'Spintronics' could enable a new generation of electronic devices, physicists say Moore's Law - a dictum of the electronics industry that says the number of transistors that fit on a computer chip will double every 18 months - may soon face some fundamental roadblocks. Most researchers think there'll eventually be a limit to how many transistors they can cram on a chip. But even if Moore's Law could continue to spawn ever-tinier chips, small electronic devices are plagued by a big problem: energy loss, or dissipation, as signals pass from one transistor to the next. Line up all the tiny wires that connect the transistors in a Pentium chip, and the total length would stretch almost a mile. A lot of useful energy is lost as heat as electrons travel that distance.
Theoretical physicists at Stanford and the University of Tokyo think they've found a way to solve the dissipation problem by manipulating a neglected property of the electron - its ''spin,'' or orientation, typically described by its quantum state as ''up'' or ''down.'' They report their findings in the Aug. 7 issue of Science Express, an online version of Science magazine. Electronics relies on Ohm's Law, which says application of a voltage to many materials results in the creation of a current. That's because electrons transmit their charge through the materials. But Ohm's Law also describes the inevitable conversion of electric energy into heat when electrons encounter resistance as they pass through materials.
''We have discovered the equivalent of a new 'Ohm's Law' for spintronics - the emerging science of manipulating the spin of electrons for useful purposes,'' says Shoucheng Zhang, a physics professor at Stanford. Professor Naoto Nagaosa of the University of Tokyo and his research assistant, Shuichi Murakami, are Zhang's co-authors. ''Unlike the Ohm's Law for electronics, the new 'Ohm's Law' that we've discovered says that the spin of the electron can be transported without any loss of energy, or dissipation. Furthermore, this effect occurs at room temperature in materials already widely used in the semiconductor industry, such as gallium arsenide. That's important because it could enable a new generation of computing devices.''
Zhang uses a celestial analogy to explain two important properties of electrons - their center of mass and their spin: ''The Earth has two kinds of motion. One is that its center of mass moves around the Sun. But the other is that it also spins by itself, or rotates. The way it moves around the Sun gives us the year, but the way it rotates around by itself gives us the day. The electron has similar properties.'' While electronics uses voltage to move an electron's center of mass, spintronics uses voltage to manipulate its spin.
The authors predict that application of an electric field will cause electrons' spins to flow together collectively in a current. The applied electric force, the spins and the spin current align in three different directions that are all perpendicular to each other (see film of the effect at http://news-service.stanford.edu/news/2003/august2 0/zhang-video-820.html).
''This is a remarkable thing,'' explains Zhang. ''I push you forward and you move sideways - not in the direction that I'm pushing you.''
So far, only superconductors are known to carry current without any dissipation. However, extremely low temperatures, typically -150 degree Celsius, are required for the dissipationless current to flow inside a superconductor. Unlike electronic superconductors being investigated in advanced laboratories throughout the world, whose operating temperatures are too low to be practical in commercial devices, Zhang, Nagaosa and Murakami theorize that the dissipationless spin cur
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
I have been waiting for this ALL WEEK! Slashdot... Saturday Night, baby!
OK, who is up first... SCO? Microsoft? My Rights Online? Let's get the good times flowin' and the great Slashdot message board cranking baby!!
Get your groove on! Lets party, Slashdotters!
Superconductors anyone? If we could figure out a way to transfer some of the spin to linear motion at the end of a wire..
YEA BABY!
The applied electric force, the spins and the spin current align in three different directions that are all perpendicular to each other ''This is a remarkable thing,'' explains Zhang. ''I push you forward and you move sideways - not in the direction that I'm pushing you.''
Same thing happens with me after about a six pack.
OK, I RTFA, and it wasn't what I was expecting.
Isn't it a property of these kinds of things that you can seperate two electrons (or some subatomic particle, can't remember) and change one's spin, and the other, no matter how far away, will instantly change? I recall an experiment in which this worked over a distance of six miles. Wouldn't this be the perfect interconnect? No wires at all?
10-12 years of gobbledegoop/spinning massturd degrees, & as it turns out, oddly enough, we're all part of one group. if you doubt it, it's ok.
more breathing. consult with/trust in yOUR creator. vote with yOUR wallet. that's the spirit.
the daze of the Godless georgewellian fuddites is dissolving into coolapps/the abyss.
all harm to innocents carries with it a bad toll. it will be repaid by innocence.
pay attention. it's quite affordable, & results in being less prone to being misled by fauxking greed/fear based felons.
...My physical electronics prof (who has over 80 patents in chip fab) told us that germanium had certain problems in collecting electrons. Which is why gallium hasn't gone away yet. But I'm not 100% sure (it was a while ago) so I could very well be wrong.
To make laws that man cannot, and will not obey, serves to bring all law into contempt.
--E.C. Stanton
Ohm's law is "voltage dropped across a load is directly proportional to the current through the load, for a constant load". What does this have to do with the law the article talks about?
Jason
ProfQuotes
Communication faster than teh speed of light that is very slow.
In theory you take a rod that goes from one galaxy to a distant galaxy many many lighyt years away. With a slight movement on one end of the rod, ina back and forth movement, the other end moves, effectively allowing communication based upon movement. Movement that is far slower than the speed of light but able to communicate to distances beyond the limitation of the speed of light.
Of course that is a simple theory only to communicate the concept of accomplishing something in a different way that is not possible on other ways. Like tryingto do advanced math using roman numerals instead of the decimal system that includes the zero place holder.
So does this spin thing make it possible to achieve antigravity or super conductivity in common use? If so, then aren't there other human resistance factors to deal with that may be more difficult and non-natural to have to deal with and overcome?
It took 300 years for the Hindu-Arabic decimal system to propogate thru the constraints of the roman numeral system supporters, regardless of the improvement in ease of math that was made possible, not to mention the technology that needed it, to be come a reality (computers).
"the spin of the electron can be transported without any loss of energy"... So the process is 100% efficient?
Thanks,
--
Matt
that with Spintronics they can make James Blish Cities in Flight type Spindizzies yet?
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
Reading the article make me recall how I believe that the cooling of some elements to achieve superconductivity is in reality just the syncing of the relative atomic speed of the elements involved.
This spin issue seems to suggest syncing as well, but without the concerns of tempature constraints below room tempature.
In maybe a 10-year timeframe, spintronics will be on par with electronics
If the actually manage to go from idea to commerically competitive "spintronic" circuitry in only a decace, I'll consider that proof of some sort of space-alien technology transfer deal going on.
Gentlemen! You can't fight in here, this is the War Room!
I had a prof in college who loved to tell the tale of finishing his bsee at mit, and didn't know what to do next. Being young and stupid (his words) he went down to the army recruiting office and inquired about electronics. The guy behind the desk says he has to come back the next week to take a test.
So, he shows up with a bunch of other hopefuls (again, his words), and takes the test. One of the questions is 'state the 3 forms of Ohm's law." As a good ee, he immediately writes down 'V = IR', no problem. Thinking (!!), he remembers there is a form involving current density, and sets about to derive it (in class this included the steps he took). Now, a third form. He drew a blank, so went and finished other parts of the test.
Coming back to this question, he's suddenly inspired by remembering something based on magnetic density in a coil or transformer. Again, he sets out to derive the equation, but the guy giving the test says 'times up' before he can finish.
The next day, he heads back to the recruiting office, and asks how he did. "Great," says the sargeant, "but, what was up with the Ohm's law question?"
"Oh, the standard form, and then experessed in current density, and...."
"Nah, all we wanted was V = IR, I = V/R, and R = V/I."
Proof of, once again, that engineers, like musicians should not try to be funny.
'ta
No system can be 100% efficient, not now, not ever. The mere fact that they would make the claim of no-energy loss whatsoever is all that it takes to set off the alert flags that this is nothing but a hoax.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
Spin is an intrinsic, unchangeable quantity for an elementary particle. Particles with half-integer spins are called fermions, while particles with integer spins are called bosons. Fermions can only be created or destroyed in particle-antiparticle pairs, whereas bosons can be created or destroyed singly.
Whenever the offence inspires less horror than the punishment, the rigour of penal law is obliged to give way...
Won't someone think of the children.
So donate today to the EFF - the Electron Freeing Foundation!
Maybe now O'Reilly can finally deliver on his 'no spin zone' promise.
Of course, if all his electrons stopped spinning it would probably be the most interesting televised farewell I've ever seen.
or did you write this?
Reminds me of a famous saying: gallium arsenide is the technology of the future, and will always be the technology of the future.
15 years ago, Cray tried to build supercomputers (the Cray 3 and Cray 4) around gallium arsenide semiconductors. Though he did manage to make this technology work, the difficulties of designing and manufacturing in (what was then) a radically new technology resulted in a product that was late to market and, ultimately, the company went under.
GaAs is used in some specialized applications - like the RF sections of cell phones. But it never managed to take over in high speed digital.
So here we have yet another prediction that GaAs has properties that make it desirable as the technology of the future - but will past historical trends continue forcing it to always remain the technology of the future?
The real question is, what is 'spin current', and how does it relate to the conventional definition of electric current.
"Nothing exists except atoms and empty space; everything else is opinion." - Democritus
V=IR
I=V/R
R=V/I
Spintronics is promising, but I doubt that it will be the NBT. Quantum-dot Cellular Automata (QCA), which encodes binary information based on electron orientation, seems to hold more promise. It is highly scalable, small, can hybridize with CMOS, and can already be fabricated at low temperatures. With the addition of clocking regions to lower inter-dot tunneling barriers, even pseudo-pipelining is realizable. Perhaps the best thing about this is that it all cells are coplanar! I just attended a conference (IWQDQC) on Quantum Computing, and believe me, spintronics faces its share of problems.
everyone talks about soviet russia like it was a bad thing... at times it seems like its better to "be pointed in the right direction" then attempt finding it yourself. have you tried being a sore thumb? do u know how fast you will be crushed into submission by neighbouring domains?! why bother, it takes too much eV to be a rebel.
http://127.0.0.1:8888/CHK@PZufTkuaioTzewPBvp-WJq7m ISgNAwI,bqLAgOnFbAMFwo-dHg-XOw/Spintronics.htm
If you're messing with electron spins, forget superconductivity and that stuff.
I want a Spindizzy.
(ref: James Blish, "Cities in Flight")
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
First, got to get my trolling out of the way. Man, this sounds like a scam to setup for future bogus patents. I'm not saying this application isn't real, just that it smells like a case of researchers setting themselves up to benefit commercially by calling a known concept 'neglected' and giving the study of it a fancy name. I'm not even doubting that they've found a combination of compounds that minimizes energy dissipation in integrated circuits.
My real statement is that even if this is leads to better integrated circuits by minimizing energy dissipation, it won't nullify the fact that the energy will still have to dissipate from electronic devices at some point. In the case of a computer system, would this mean that other components would have to deal with increased heat rather than the situation we have now--CPU overheating?
"movement" of the spin of an electron, by the application of an electric field.
Angular momentum.
Maxwell's laws.
And this is where it's all hinged... The "sensitive spin detector". What is a "spin detector"? I still haven't seen or heard everything, but this gem is going to get a special note in my memory bank. How exactly does one measure the spin of an electron? How do you know that you've got your spin detector focused in on the correct electron in the first place? Just how sensitive is this spin detector? Is it as sensitive as my b.s. detector?
--
Pull the other one, and my pants will fall down.
I've re-read Cities in Flight at least three or four times and see this spintronics stuff would make the spindizzy engine work. All we need now is a way to break New York City free from it's base of bed rock, and send it on it's way. Then Washington, D.C. whilst Congress is in session, and I see a Win-Win situation here. Hell, let's just spin off the whole Northeast corridor from The Beltway to Boston and be done with it.
Too lazy to create a sig...
"And this is where it's all hinged... The "sensitive spin detector". What is a "spin detector"? I still haven't seen or heard everything, but this gem is going to get a special note in my memory bank. How exactly does one measure the spin of an electron?"
Simple. You use a very drunk physicist. Heads it's up, tails it's down. Flat on his back, the experiment's over.
"materials already widely used in the semiconductor industry, such as gallium arsenide.'""
Kirk: Warp Factor Ten Scotty!
Scotty: I'm giving her all the gallium arsenide we've got Captain but she's suckin' mud!
You know you're a geek if you've ever replied to a tagline.
I'll believe it when I can order one from Digi-Key. :-)
--- Ban humanity.
He's just a news talk show host. I really can't find what all the animosity is about. It's bizarre.
The discussion on spin is wrong. Spin has nothing to do with the rotation of macroscopic objects like the Earth, it's an intrinsic quantum property of particles like the electronic with no macroscopic analog. The best explanation I've heard of spin that doesn't involve explaining the details goes like this: spin is a measurement of the number of rotations required to bring a particle back to its initial state. One-half spin particles, like the electron, require, counterintuitively, two full rotations to go back to their initial state.
The physical situation seems to have very little to do with Ohm's Law except in the loosest sense. They're describing a current consisting of electron spins under an external electric field. This has some interesting properties (I'd like to poke at the math, if I could read the paper), one of which seems to be that it is predicted to persist at much higher temperatures than the best superconductors. If so, because this spin current seems to be dissipationless, this would allow information to be transmitted without generating heat.
Interesting stuff; a pity the article was so poor.
For what it's worth, spintronics is already in use for disk drives.
From what I understand, the read/write heads of just about every modern disk drive are spintronics devices. Without them, we'd probably still be stuck with 1 GB disk drives.
I really don't know how that comma got there. I didn't intend it.
... to eliminate the harmful effects of Spin Doctors on their environment. Ehhh, well... can't have everything. *Goes back to surfing the web on his Sit-N-Spin* Mnem Ch-Ya! That'd like... Totally screw the pooch, babe!
Always has been, always will be.
I had to dig but eventually found it at the following location. http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/data/1087128/DC1/1
The very first thing one should know about thermodynamics is that it only makes sense at macroscopic level. So please stop your nonsensical babbling.
-- Repeat with me: "There is no right to profits".
Perhaps more relevant to us is the fact that zero dissipation means, in effect, zero heat. It also means zero loss so power requirements, so important in the portable market, would lessen exponentially. Spintronics based devices would therefore not need the elaborate cooling solutions current semiconductors do. A truly silent computer may be just over the horizon, folks...
Resistance is futile. Reactance buggers it up.
So what's the "spintronics" formula?
In the last few years logic speeds have approached this, and you can now by GHz-level gates as part of the ECLinPS family.
make world, not war
"spin is a measurement of the number of rotations required to bring a particle back to its initial state"
Yeah, that's a particle's spin number. You don't think spintronics involves changing that, do you? That would be like changing an electron's charge.
There's a whole other kind of spin, which is similar to macroscopic rotation. That's why they call it "spin". It's not a perfect explanation, but it's close enough for the general public.
There should be a mod "-1 I Don't Think So, Captain" for people who critique science articles with Star Trek level technobabble.
another handy property of an electron is the ability to link it to another electron. by manipulating both electron spins at the same time they are linked. when one electron's spin is changed the other's is changed as well instantaneously. or so my physics professor claims. thus far there appears to be no dependance on distance. just think, instantaneous communications with a space probe using electron spin techniques, no more sending a probe out and then giving up on it when it goes out of communication range. since this technique does not use radio waves then you no longer have to worry about the blackout time durring space shuttle landing etc. etc. real potential here for massive technological jumps.
Red Hat is for people who hate Windows, FreeBSD is for people who love Unix.
www.putertech.net
Spread the pain... :-)
Karma: Excellent (My Karma? I wish...:-( )
If you're mystified by spin and quantum physics in general, This entry on ElectronOrbitals is a good place to start.
This is a new part of (or companion to?) Eric Weisstein's Mathworld. It's expanded now into Science World. Some of the references to electrons and spin are not yet complete, but there's enough here to get started.
It's easier to be a result of the past, but more fun to be a cause of the future! http://www.spacefinancegroup.com/