May 2007

A University of Alberta research team has combined two fields of study in nanotechnology to create a third field that the researchers believe will lead to revolutionary advances in computer electronics, among many other areas.

Dr. Abdulhakem Elezzabi and his colleagues have applied plasmonics principles to spintronics technology and created a novel way to control the quantum state of an electron's spin.

The new technology, which the researchers call spinplasmonics, may be used to create incredibly efficient electron spin-based photonic devices, which in turn may be used to build, for example, computers with extraordinary capacities.

Researchers have taken the first step toward building silicon-based computers that use a fraction of the power of today's machines. A team has injected electrons into silicon in such a way that their spins, or magnetic orientations, tend to be aligned in one direction instead of the other.

In the new device, Appelbaum and co-workers inject electrons from a layer of aluminum through a thin layer of ferromagnet (a permanent magnet) and into a pure silicon crystal. Aluminum has a 50–50 mix of spin up and spin down electrons - the two possible orientations. The ferromagnet, however, blocks electrons of one spin while letting the others flow into the silicon.

The researchers found that their ferromagnet barrier gave silicon a one percent excess of one spin type versus the other, at a temperature of 85 kelvins, they report in a paper published online today in the journal Nature.

Read more here (Scientific American) 

Product sales for the fourth quarter of fiscal 2007 increased 50% over the prior-year quarter to $4.19 million from $2.80 million. Total revenue, consisting of product sales and contract research and development revenue, increased 31% to $4.57 million for the fourth quarter of fiscal 2007 from $3.48 million in the prior-year quarter. Net income for the fourth quarter of fiscal 2007 increased 151% to $1.55 million, or $0.33 per diluted share, compared to $619,744, or $0.13 per share, for the prior-year quarter.

In an important step toward future data-storage technologies based on magnetism, a research group has determined how to control the magnetization of a “magnetic vortex,” a curling nanometer-sized magnetic structure present within tiny, millionth-of-a-meter-sized magnetic disks. Understanding the behavior of this type of structure is one of the main requirements of magnetic data-storage development.

Across the globe, teams of researchers are working to build viable spin-based electronic devices – spintronics – using spin currents. This group's work opens the possibility that simple magnetic disks can serve as the building blocks for spintronic devices like memory cells, where each bit of information would be stored as the direction of the vortex-core's field. Vortex-core switching could be an efficient way of writing data to a memory device.

Read more here (Physorg)