Slashdot Mirror
Nanotechnology + Superconductivity = Spintronics
karvind writes "Spintronics is a nanoscale technology in which information is carried not by the electron's charge, as it is in conventional microchips, but by the electron's intrinsic spin and if a reliable way can be found to control and manipulate the spins spintronic devices could offer higher data processing speeds, lower electric consumption, and many other advantages over conventional chips--including, perhaps, the ability to carry out radically new quantum computations. PhysOrg is reporting that University of Notre Dame physicist Boldizsar Janko and his colleagues have found a way to achieve this control using a magnetic semiconductor, insulator and superconducting material stack of thicknesses of order of few dozen nanometers. IBM and Stanford are also looking into spintronics."
Seems like one of the Unsolved Problems in Physics isn't exactly unsolved anymore.
Are you SURE this isn't a technology developed jointly by the press and the White House?
R(k)
Microsoft is reportedly already somewhat advanced in spintronics. A company offical reportedly said "We consider ourselves to be industry leaders when it comes to manipulation using spin."
What's the cheapest device that I, a layman, can buy to set the spin of large amounts of electrons (several coulombs per second) to a certain value?
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make install -not war
I know this isn't exactly what the article said, but I had a thought. If computers could base data on spin and charge at the same time (4 possibilities), would there be any significant advantage to being able to work natively in base 4 instead of base 2?
"We are the Dyslexia of Borg. Your ass will be laminated. Futility is resistant."
How does Spintronics stack up against Plasmonics? I mean, they're both being touted as The Next Big Thing in chips. Are the compatible in any way? Different time frames?
I heard of spintronics before. I have some idea of what electron spin is from university, but not much more. So when I saw the article, I thought "wow, great, a nice-looking /. blurb choke full of links to the subject"... only to discover that 4 out of the 5 links link back to /. itself, and the last one links to a half-page semi-general article in physorg.com.
I don't know, I guess I may as well Google spintronics at random...
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
What did the proton say to the electron after the electron asked it if it had HIV?
I'm positive
Spintronics also represents one of the quickest transitions from lab to market, next to the transistor via GMR sensors. The hard disk read heads on the hard drives in your computer, if you bought a new disk in the past few years, already incorporates spintronic effects through GMR (Giant MagnetoResistance). Most major media storage and also electronics companies have been heavily investigating spintronics for years too, not to mention a good percentage of condensed-matter physicsists, electrical and materials-science engineers.
Spintronics is also being investigated for quantum computation because the two electron eigenstates in any direction (up / down) can make a good basis for the Zero and One states of a qubit.
But to repeat the hype, spintronics does have potential to revolutionize the electronics industry by offering a whole new degree of freedom to manipulate of the electrons. 'Classical' transistors move/detect/switch charge, adding spin to the picture allows much more flexibility, and probably higher device speeds or data densities. Eg, perhaps microprocessors can go from binary as presence/lack of charge to spintronic up/down charge. Or perhaps even base-4 using presence/absence of both spin up and spin down flavors of electrons.
Wouldn't that be a nano-superconudctor?
What would Nano-Superman be like? He's a tiny little bugger, but durn, is he strong!
Yet another sickening blow has struck what's left of the Linux community, as a soon-to-be-released report by the independent Commision for Technology Management (CTM) after a year-long study has concluded: Linux is already dead. Here are some of the commission's findings:
.005% of internet servers. This led to Mandrakesoft, makers of another troubled distro, to purchase Connectiva. However, industry anaylists say that this will not help since Mandrakesoft is already a shell of its former self.
Fact: Linux has balkanized yet again. There are now no less than 120 separate, competing Linux distros, each of which has introduced fundamental incompatibilities with the other distros, and frequently with Unix standards. Average number of developers in each project (except for Redhat and Novell/Suse): fewer than five. Average number of users per project: there are no definitive numbers, but reports show that all projects are on the decline.
Fact: Trivial issues such as names and a lack of professionalism continue to plague Linux. At a recent Linux conference in San Francisco, a fight broke out between RMS (Richard M. Stallman) who says Linux should be called GNU/Linux and Linus Torvalds who created Linux and says that Linux should be called Linux. This led to a massive barroom style brawl involving at least 150 Linux geeks. The SFPD was called out to break up the melee, and arrested 150 people. It was estimated that at least 2 to 3 times that many were involved in the brawl, but there wasn't enough police on hand to arrest all of them. Thirty one people were hospitalized as a result of this brawl, and one person is still in a coma.
Fact: There are almost no Connectiva developers left, and its use, according to Netcraft, is down to a sadly crippled
Fact: X.org will not include support for Redhat's Fedora project. The newly formed group believes that Fedora has strayed too far from Unix standards and have become too difficult to support along with other Linux distros and Solaris x86. "It's too much trouble," said one anonymous developer. "If they want to make their own standards, let them doing the porting for us."
Fact: Ubuntu Linux, yet another offshoot of the beleaguered Debian "distro", is already collapsing under the weight of internal power struggles and in-fighting. "They haven't done a single decent release," notes Mark Baron, an industry watcher and columnist. "Their mailing lists read like an online version of a Jerry Springer episode, complete with food fights, swearing, name-calling, and chair-throwing. It also doesn't help that Ubuntu sounds like an obscure term for a gay orgy." Netcraft reports that Ubuntu Linux is run on exactly 0% of internet servers.
Fact: Debian Linux, which claims to focus on "being free" (whatever that is supposed to mean), is slow, and cannot take advantage of multiple CPUs. "That about drove the last nail in the coffin for Linux use here," said Michael Curry, CTO of Amazon.com. "We took our Debian boxes out to the backyard and shot them in the head. We're much happier running FreeBSD."
Fact: The Slackware Distro is now dead. The Slackware team could never get their distro to function on hardware other than Intel and S/390. Had they not been slacking off, Slackware would still be around.
Fact: Servers running SELinux, which claims to focus on security, are frequently compromised. According to Jim Markham, editor of the online security forum SecurityWatch, the few SELinux servers that exist on the internet have become a joke among the hacker community. "They make a game out of it," he says. "The SELinux team will scramble to make a new patch to fix one problem, and they've already compromised a bunch of boxes with a different exploit."
With these incontroverible facts staring (what's left of) the Linux community in the face, they can only draw one conclusion: Linux is already dead.
This is just the type of technology that we have secretly been investigating from crashed ufo's.
Memory now doesn't use positive and negative charge, it already uses magnetic fields. So it will still be binary, spin up and spin down.
you must mean 'of a thickness in the order of a few.....'
We Americans should keep this technology secret. It could prove a boon to military communications. If the Chinese had access to this technology, they would quickly integrate it into their space-born weapons systems.
I carry the cables for his spintronics! Ya gotta believe me!
Does that make Boldizsar Janko the 'Spin Doctor'?
1) get an MS or PhD studying some exotic physical phenomenon
2) publish the results accompanied by wildly optimistic claims
3) ?
4) Profit!
Hmmm... I seem to remember this...but I can't find record of it on slashdot. can anyone remember if this has come up somewhere before?
.
-shpoffo
Is it too late to stop the proliferation of "-tron" words? "-tron" means nothing; "electrons" are so called because of the Greek word for amber, which the Greeks knew to be capable of producing a static charge. What if people abstracted part of that word out and started calling every new technology "something-ber"?
I think the technical name for the combining from "-tron" is a "cranberry morpheme," from "*cran," which apparently has no independent meaning.
Shop as usual. And avoid panic buying.
Scranton is sent skyward?
And what about cities down in Florida, like Lutz or Bithlo? Is there anyone down here who'd mind them being sent out into space?
I drank what? -- Socrates
THAT IS WUT I SED:
http://www.myplanet.net/gthing/Picture%202.png
In the next 50 years or so do you think that photonics or spintronics will become the main technology behind computation, or will we see a hybrid computer that uses the best of both technologies (e.g. computation/cpu using spintronics and data transport in buses between devices/peripherals using photonics)?
The spindizzy drive will give us Cities in FLight. I would like to recommend Seffner, Mango, or maybe Wimauma as Florida burgs to spin out.
Too lazy to create a sig...
...Nanotechnology + Superconductivity = Supertechnonanocondoexpialidocious
Mr. T pitied this fool on 27 July 1992.
it has already imagined a beowolf cluster of itself!
Of *BSD 4sswipes
Have a look at some of the google ads that appear around the article : ) "Life-prolonging magnets" "Immortality device".... : )
No, no sig. Really.
ThePromenader
And I was disappointed at the casual references to superconducting materials and flux-tube manipulation. No way is any of this stuff a given.
There is a limit to how much of a system you can simulate while still retaining a semblance to practical reality. Spintronics seems to exceed it.
And on top of that, even if it worked, it would be susceptible to interference from external magnetic fields, which are far harder to shield against than the electric ones that can create interference in our existing electronic systems. (Interference by magnetic induction is only a minor secondary susceptibility in electronics.)
Where spintronics get really silly though is in its need for nanotechnology. Once we have nanotech, there will be no need for spin manipulation at all, since you'll be able to build mnechanical computers with trillions of times our current MIPs using elementary principles that have been very widely documented in the nanotech literature.
"if a reliable way can be found to control and manipulate the spins spintronic devices could offer higher data processing speeds"
Heh, heh... Only if! Slashdot: Speculation for nerds. Stuff that's not news yet. And this coming on the tails of "Firefox 1.1 - Nope, not yet." What happened? Everything used to be so old around here.
Boldizsar Janko would be a great name for a rock and roll band.
Why? The -tron (or more accurately the -on suffix) words aren't Greek. They serve a useful purpose and the suffix is used in a single fairly well-defined way. I find it to be an ingenious solution to the labeling of particle-like objects.
Spin Wave technology is nothing new, for that matter it's just it's nature,and then we "doscovery" it as something new. Check out: http://www.hightechscience.org/spin_wave_technolog y.htm
For those interested in Spintronics and Quantum Entanglement visit this website.
http://colossalstorage.net/