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Major Breakthrough In Spintronics Research
Invisible Pink Unicorn writes "Spintronics is the field of research into developing devices that rely on electron spin rather than electron charge to carry information. A major advance has been made by the Naval Research Laboratory (NRL), where they have for the first time generated, modulated, and electrically detected a pure spin current in silicon. Progress in this field is expected to lead to devices which provide higher performance with lower power consumption and heat dissipation. Basic research efforts at NRL and elsewhere have shown that spin angular momentum, another fundamental property of the electron, can be used to store and process information in metal and semiconductor based devices. The article abstract is available from Applied Physics Letters."
Spintronics is the field of research into developing devices that rely on electron spin rather than electron charge to carry information.
Yes, I believe it's called a "Phonograph".
The theory of relativity doesn't work right in Arkansas.
All the politicians in Washington are jumping for joy for the advancement of their Spin techniques.
I for one welcome our new spinning electron overlords.
the parent post is many negative things, but redundent? I do believe his is the first overlords post, not the second or third...
Now, the press release says the exciting thing about "spintronics" (ugh) is that " it frees one from the constraints of capacitive time constants and resistive voltage drops and heat buildup which accompany charge motion."
.which generates a pure spin current flowing in the opposite direction. . ."
/. article excitedly and credulously calls it?
Well, fair enough; I can readily imagine that if you could get information to flow through a magical material without having to actually make electrons move, that would be great. No more of that pesky knocking into the lattice that they do which converts their motion into heat.
But...um...how exactly do you get a spin current without the electrons actually moving? I mean, given that the spins in question are nailed to the electron? Seems tricky. Like driving down the highway without having your car move...
Furthermore, if we read further down the abstract, we find this:
"NRL scientists first inject a spin polarized electrical current. . .
Sounds to me like the existence of their spin current depends on the existence of an old-fashioned charge current. So how's this help? How is this a "key enabling advance" (as the press release calls it), still less a "major breakthrough" as the
This must really scare Bill O'Reilly.
This sounds like the type of thing that will work under laboratory vacuum conditions, but which
we are decades away from being able to implement usefully for any real world application.
Since they are using the angular momentum of electrons to register as a voltage for recognition,
how susceptible to interference is such a system? I would imagine simply shining a flashlight
on such a quantum circuit would affect the resultant output... unless I'm way off.
Any microminds care to shed some light on this?
Wasn't Spintronics the maker of SpinArt?
For some reason, the term "spintronics" makes me think of it as though this was a long series of ball bearings in physical contact with the adjacent ones, and using the rotational force of the starting point to rotate each ball bearing in an opposite direction as the ones they're in physical contact with... eventually transferring the rotation to the end point.
Is it simply a case that in spintronics that the electrons used to carry a current don't actually leave their respective atoms (as they do in AC and DC current), but are just being rotated faster/slower or alternating direction?
8==8 Bones 8==8
IIRC, the idea of acronyms is to save faster by less typing by the sender and processing by the reader. When you do the acronym, followed by the explanation, it is neither.
Humanity will be unstoppable once we have invented these phase converters to modulate!
but I'm trying to figure out how this can be applied to our current electronic designs. If we use electron spin to store data, and presuming that we can determine which way it's spinning, then that gives us a total of six possibilities, right?
+pitch -pitch +yaw -yaw +roll -roll
Or, of course, this could be denoted as 0 and 1 instead of + and -. However, doesn't that throw out the current binary model? This'll effectively be base six, instead of base two, won't it?
I dunno - this isn't exactly my field, so I'm just trying to understand, is all.
http://xkcd.com/313/
Sounds like a silly question, I know, but I seem to recall that when talking about the "spin" of fundamental particles, you aren't really talking about the same thing as when you're talking about the spin of a baseball. Can anyone confirm/clarify this?
"Convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies."
Well, I'm not a particle physicist either, but I did my master's thesis on this type of system(*) So, how close are they to applications?
First of all, they've measured from 5K up to 80K which is about quarter of room temperature, practically there by solid state physics standards (see the Nature paper). Considering that the effect didn't dwindle by more than half in that range, that's a very good sign that it could be brought up to room temperature. The problem is in getting the electrons "lined up" enough. In the Nature paper they estimate that they see about 30% more spin up than down electrons, but for real applications you'd like to get a lot closer to "100% polarization". I guess that problem might be solvable, but it includes a lot of putting very thin layers of material on single crystal with quite extreme tolerances. Then again, chip fab tolerances are quite extreme already.
In cases like this it's hard to figure out how well stuff will work without actually trying, and that's what this recent paper is about: They've built a transistor-like device with technology similar to that which would be used for mass production and measured a (tiny) effect. Now it's a matter of optimisation, and they might just get there, but it'll be years at least before it's time to start drafting the chip layout.
(*) Hint: If it involves building huge accelerators to crash particles together at pseudo-Big-Bang conditions, it's particle physics. If it involves sticking little pieces of semiconductor into a magnet at 5 Kelvin it's solid state physics. Not that solid state physicists don't use particles, we're all over electrons, phonons, excitons, magnons and many other 'ons that ignorants dismiss as "quasi"particles. Hrmph!
Any sufficiently advanced libertarian utopia is indistinguishable from government.
Is there ANY discipline that some slashdotter doesn't have a Ph.D. in?
As a graduate student who studies semiconductor spintronics, I'd have a hard time calling this a major breakthrough. It's an interesting paper, but it basically adds incrementally to previous work involving spins in silicon. In particular, see references [10] and [11] in the APL article. Reference [10] was the first paper to demonstrate spin transport in silicon and was published in an issue of Nature. See: dx.doi.org/10.1038/nnano.2007.174
I'd like to add that the farther along in my science career I've gotten, the more I've realized just how abysmal most science writing is. Of course, it's not an easy task trying to convey the motivation behind a highly technical experiment or field of study to someone who typically doesn't know much more about science than what they learned in high school, but it really has made me wonder how accurate the interpretations and conclusions of other, non-science news article are.
Wouldn't spinning the electrons faster cause the atom to move into a higher energy state? (Plasma?) /I'll take one in the 40 Megawatt range......
I am the unwilling control for my Origin.
I just did. Found Bill O'Reilly's web page and the wikipedia article, etc.
I think the joke has something to do with spin doctoring, but I wouldn't swear to it.
That a law suit has just been filed in east Texas.
Well would it?
I read Slashdot for the headlines, because the headlines, unlike the articles, are usually original and never duplicated
It looks like you're reading a quantum state. Do you wish to continue? Yes/No? No/Yes?
the term "spin" confuses a lot of people. It comes from when they discovered that electrons can act like little bar magnets, they thought that it was spinning. Charge moving in a circle creates a magnetic field, so they they thought that electron magnetism was due to the electron spinning like a top. We now know that this could not possibly be the case for a variety of reasons, including the staggering speed that it would need to be spinning at, but scientists still use the term "spin" to describe the electrons' intrinsic magnetism, just to annoy people.
Best to think of them as little bar magnets rather than spinning tops.
We must move forward, not backward. Upward, not forward. And always twirling, twirling, twirling.
Ah, so as someone academically qualified to discuss xons in general, is there indeed such a mathematical object as a 'spintron,' or is this another case of a journalist and/or PR person who doesn't have a clue about the atomic structure of language?
(but not the press release because really, what science comes from press releases)
That's odd... I thought press releases were all about spin.
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
No, I've never heard of spintrons. I think it's just a construction to sound like electronics while implying that it's about spin. I don't know who invented the term, but I don't mind it - it's relatively descriptive after all, and it's used in a number of scientific articles. The one problem might be that it can become a bit over-hyped, but in general too few people know about it for that to be a problem.
Any sufficiently advanced libertarian utopia is indistinguishable from government.
I think what I resent about it is that I now need to allocate two new slots in my mental lexicon—one for "spintronics" (ok, fine, it's a new concept) and one for "-tron-" (but meaning what, exactly?). If they want a catchy new word, why not just call it something new, like 'flarp', or something more regularly derived, like 'spinics' (still an abomination in classical terms, but far more structurally resonable)?
I wish all these PhD-types would go to school, or something! ;)
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and not everyone thinks the other guys' fetishes are all that interesting.
HTH/HAND