September 2023

Sensor specialist startup Neuranics has secured a $2.3 million investment led by Par Equity. GU Holdings, the investment company for the University of Glasgow, Old College Capital, the University of Edinburgh’s venture investment fund, and London-based Creator Fund, who back scientific founding teams, also participated in the pre-seed round.

Founded in 2021 as a joint spinout from the University of Glasgow and the University of Edinburgh, Neuranics develops pioneering magnetic sensors integrated with semiconductor technology for health, fitness, and metaverse applications. Neuranics’s patented technology uses scalable spintronics sensors powered by semiconductors to detect tiny magnetic signals from organs in the body – for example the heart and muscles of the arms, which the company says could transform the current shortcomings of health monitoring devices and human-machine interfaces.

Researchers from the University of Waterloo, NIST and McMaster University have used neutron imaging and a reconstruction algorithm to reveal for the first time the 3D shapes and dynamics of skyrmions in bulk materials.

The combined image reveals the shape and length of the skyrmion tubes, which vary in response to defects encountered in the surrounding material lattice. Credit: Phys.org, adapted from Nature Physics (2023)

The team is exploring a promising spintronic candidate, a magnetic skyrmion, which is a vortex-like formation of atoms. It arises naturally in certain kinds of atomic lattices in response to magnetic and electrical properties of the surrounding atoms. Skyrmions are typically in the range of 20 to 200 nanometers (billionths of a meter) in size. 

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Researchers from Tohoku University, Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS), Guangxi Normal University, Kyushu University and Japan Atomic Energy Agency have reported a significant breakthrough which could revolutionize next-generation electronics by enabling non-volatility, large-scale integration, low power consumption, high speed, and high reliability in spintronic devices.

Spintronic devices, such as magnetic random access memory (MRAM), utilize the magnetization direction of ferromagnetic materials for information storage and rely on spin current, a flow of spin angular momentum, for reading and writing data. Conventional semiconductor electronics have faced limitations in achieving these qualities. However, the emergence of three-terminal spintronic devices, which employ separate current paths for writing and reading information, presents a solution with reduced writing errors and increased writing speed. Nevertheless, the challenge of reducing energy consumption during information writing, specifically magnetization switching, remains a critical concern.

Researchers at Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz, the University of Konstanz and Tohoku University in Japan have increased the diffusion of magnetic whirls, so called skyrmions, by a factor of ten.

Science often does not simply consider the spin of an individual electron, but rather magnetic whirls composed of numerous spins. These whirls, called skyrmions, emerge in magnetic metallic thin layers and can be considered as two-dimensional quasi-particles. On the one hand, the whirls can be deliberately moved by applying a small electric current to the thin layers; on the other hand, they move randomly and extremely efficiently due to diffusion. The feasibility of creating a functional computer based on skyrmions was demonstrated by a team of researchers from Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz (JGU), led by Professor Dr. Mathias Kläui, using an initial prototype. This prototype consisted of thin, stacked metallic layers, some only a few atomic layers thick.

Researchers from TU Delft and the Federal University of São Carlos (UFSCAR) have teamed up to explore Van der Waals Heterostructures for Spintronics via a recent SPRINT grant. 

The goal of the collaboration is to combine the expertise of two labs: Prof. Herre Van der Zant at TU Delft;s group on fabricating heterostructures involving two-dimensional magnetic materials and Prof. Yara Galvão Gobato's group at UFSCAR on optical measurements on semiconductors.