July 2006

Leeds physicists are leading a new £2.3m project to make new materials which would allow computer memory and other components to use magnetism rather than conventional electrical charges, paving the way for smaller, faster gadgets.

Magnetism in microelectronic components - spintronics - is already used for reading high performance hard disks, like those in iPods. A similar device can also store information magnetically on a memory chip, instead of needing an electric charge. Charges leak away and have to be replenished a thousand times a second, but magnetism doesn't require a power supply. It can also be used to control the flow of electrons in a component so a chip could re-configure itself in the most effective way for each calculation it handled.

The consortium is led by Professor Brian Hickey at Leeds and includes Cambridge, Imperial, Durham, Glasgow, Exeter and City universities and the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory. It will look at new and existing ways of applying spintronics, develop new materials and push the limits of our current understanding of magnetism. The group - Spin@RT - is funded by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) and is supported by some of the world's biggest hard-drive and electronics manufacturers.

Leeds specialises in making magnetic materials and thanks to £240,000 from the Wolfson Foundation (and £210,000 from the University) they are now using a 'sputter' machine (pictured) which allows them to fabricate materials in layers with thickness control equivalent to adding or removing a single atom.

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Electronic devices are always shrinking in size but it's hard to imagine anything beating what researchers at the University of New South Wales have created: a tiny wire that doesn't even use electrons to carry a current.

Known as a hole quantum wire, it exploits gaps – or holes - between electrons. The relationship between electrons and holes is like that between electrons and anti-electrons, or matter and anti-matter.

The holes can be thought of as real quantum particles that have an electrical charge and a spin. They exhibit remarkable quantum properties and could lead to a new world of super-fast, low-powered transistors and powerful quantum computers.

Associate Professor Alex Hamilton and Dr Adam Micolich, who lead the UNSW Quantum Electronic Devices group in Sydney, Australia, say the discovery that the holes can carry an electrical current puts the team at the front of its field in the quantum electronics revolution.

Quantum wires are microscopically small, in this case about 100 times narrower than a human hair. They are so narrow that electrons can only pass along them in single file.

Manufacturers are keenly interested in them because they hold the potential for new high-speed electronics applications, known as spintronics, where semiconductor devices have both electric and magnetic properties.

Electrons have both electric (charge) and magnetic (spin) properties but today's micro-chips use only the charge properties of electrons.

"To move ahead with spintronics, we need to be able to control the magnetic properties with electronics," says Professor Hamilton.

"Quantum holes also have spin, and this can be strongly affected by electric impulses. So semiconductors that use holes, rather than electrons, would be good for spintronics and quantum information technologies that use spin to store and process data." 

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In a first-of-its-kind achievement, U.S. scientists say they've directly imaged the interactions between two magnetic atoms less than one nanometer apart.

Researchers at the University of Iowa, the University of Illinois- Champaign and Princeton University said their findings bring scientists one step closer toward realizing the goal of building a very advanced semiconductor computer chip.

Such a chip would be based upon a property of the electron called "spin" and the related technology of "spintronics," said Michael Flatté, a professor in the University of Iowa's department of physics and astronomy.

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Product sales for the quarter increased 71% over the prior-year quarter to $3.05 million from $1.78 million. Total revenue, which consisted of product sales and contract research and development revenue, increased 20% to $3.64 million for the first quarter of fiscal 2007 from $3.03 million for the prior-year quarter. Net income for the quarter was $891,806 or $0.19 per diluted share, compared to $412,649 or $0.09 per diluted share for the prior-year quarter.

Net income for the quarter ended June 30, 2006 included the effect of $2,569 in non-cash stock-based compensation due to the implementation of SFAS 123(R). Net income for the first quarter of fiscal 2007 also included a $473,241 non-cash provision for income taxes compared to $240,468 for the prior-year quarter.

The theory has been around for more than 40 years, but only now has it been confirmed through direct and unambiguous experimental results. Working at the Advanced Light Source (ALS) of the U.S. Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, a team of researchers has observed the theoretical prediction of electron "spin-charge separation" in a one-dimensional solid. These results hold implications for future developments in several key areas of advanced technology, including high-temperature superconductors, nanowires and spintronics.

Just as the body and wheels of a car are thought to be intrinsic parts of a whole, incapable of separate and independent actions, i.e., the body goes right while the wheels go left, so, too, are electrical charge and spin intrinsic components of an electron. Except, according to theory, in one-dimensional solids, where the collective excitation of a system of electrons can lead to the emergence of two new particles called "spinons" and "holons." A spinon carries information about an electron's spin and a holon carries information about its charge, and they do so as separate and independent entities. Numerous experiments have tried to confirm the creation of spinons and holons, referred to as spin-charge separation, but it took the technological advantages offered at ALS Beamline 7.0.1, also known as the Electronic Structure Factory (ESF), to achieve success.