New Material for Spintronics Discovered

Cpt_Corelli writes "Researchers at Uppsala University and the Swedish Royal Institute of Technology have discovered a new material with properties suitable for creating spintronic devices at room temperature. Previously this was only believed to be available at very low temperatures. The material is a combination of zinc oxide and manganite. The breakthrough is the cover item of the October issue of Nature Materials. If this new material proves viable for production there is an enormous potential for smaller and faster processors. Could this be the beginning of a new era in processor development?"

Comments

Spin Doctors

[heironymouscoward]

In English: using the spin on individual electrons as a way of storing data.

Incredible, really. I could store the Library of Congress in the LCD pixels represented by this: .

Several times, I suspect.

Re:Spin Doctors

[QuantumFTL]

Disclaimer: I'm just about done with my bachelors in Physics.

In English: using the spin on individual electrons as a way of storing data.

One of my physics professors here at Cornell does a lot of heavy spintronics research, and I can tell you that they are not even *CONSIDERING* using single electron spins to store classical information right now. Forget all the crazy quantum effects, and the fact that all the electrons nearby would interfere horrendously thorugh spin-spin interactions, thermal energy would screw that up in a jiffy. Think what happens to a magnet when it's heated up to the curie temperature (electrons are just tiny magnets). We don't even have a way to accurately measure the spin of one exact electron yet.

As I understand it, the idea is actually pretty simple: instead of propagating electrical signals in a stream of electrons by altering their momentums (through the use of an EM field), you propagate a change in spin along the stream. Instead of speeding up or slowing down electrons, you're only flipping them up and down (you're actually flipping entire regions at that). Because of hte spin-spin coupling I mentioned before, this change in spin will propagate through the group of electrons *VERY* rapidly, much closer to the speed of light than a change in momentum would (by changing voltage, etc). So what we have is *MUCH* higher switching speeds with hardly any energy loss! So basically you have ultra-high speed chips that dissapate very little energy. Forget that watercooler in your laptop, you might not even need more than a tiny battery once spintronics becomes popular.

Now, as with any technology spintronics has its set of challenges. The biggest one that I am aware of is the ability to inject spin properly when electrons are moving between different materials. Many crystaline structures can alter the spin state significantly on entry, thus destroying the signal (or at least reducing it). I am confident, however, that many of these problems can be solved, especially given that spintronics is provably much better than electronics for computing tasks. Just look at the enormous number of problems the semiconductor industry has already solved in the last 40 years. Add to that the hope that all of this could work at room temperature, and well, it's very exciting to say the least.

So once again, we're not talking about individual electron spin. The only computing paradigms I'm aware of that use spin of individual particles are Quantum Computers (which do not behave the same algorithmically as classical computers) which are an entirely different story.

Cheers,
Justin

In abstractio

[Seehund]

Does posting a link to the Nature Materials abstract count as karma whoring, when there's maybe only three people here who would understand what it says? ;)

A pedant writes...

[Hittite Creosote]

Md-doped means Manganese doped, not Manganite. Manganese is an element, Manganite is a mineral, MnO(OH).

Explanation...

[Cpt_Corelli]

As another poster mentioned earlier, this type of material has been creted earlier, but had to be kept at a temperature below -101 deg Celsius to function. A more detailed look at this field is available here.

This article (from feb 2003) mentions that one of the major obstacles is making it work at room temperature which now has been achieved. Apparently this is a huge breakthrough.

Not new, improved

[Hittite Creosote]

Just to be clear, they aren't the first to look at Mn-doped ZnO as a spintronic material - people have been working on this material since the 1990s. Theoretical work by researchers at Tohoku University in Japan and others predicted that Md-doped ZnO could work at room temperature. After which, Others started work investigating the properties, and trying to improve the fabrication of the material to reach ferromagentism at higher temperatures.

150 degrees Celcius

[thorgil]

The new material is said to keep it special abilities at temperatures up to 150 degrees C.