Latest Spin Stories

At the Large Hadron Collider at CERN protons crash into each other at incredibly high energies in order to 'smash' the protons and to study the elementary particles of nature "“ including quarks. Quarks are found in each proton and are bound together by forces which cause all other known forces of nature to fade. To understand the effects of these strong forces between the quarks is one of the greatest challenges in modern particle physics. New theoretical results from the Niels Bohr...

Team successfully decoupled a single quantum spin from its surroundingsFinding ways to control matter at the level of single atoms and electrons fascinates many scientists and engineers because the ability to manipulate single charges and single magnetic moments (spins) may help researchers penetrate deep into the mysteries of quantum mechanics and modern solid-state physics. It may also allow development of new, highly sensitive magnetometers with nanometer resolution, single-spin...

The PhD thesis by Carlos Echeverría Arrondo, Doctor in Physics from the Public University of Navarre and entitled "On doped semiconductor quantum dots and magnetic nanowires", studied the behaviour and properties of nanometric-scale semiconductor crystals.The interest aroused by nanoscience and nanotechnology spurred Dr Echeverría to study the behaviour of semiconductor crystals when their size is reduced to less than one hundred nanometres (a nanometre is a millionth part of a...

The integration of single-spin magnetoelectronics into standard silicon technology may soon be possible, if experiments confirm a new theoretical prediction by physicists at the Naval Research Laboratory and the University of Wisconsin-Madison. The researchers predict that a family of well-known silicon surfaces, stabilized by small amounts of gold atoms, is intrinsically magnetic despite having no magnetic elements. None of these surfaces has yet been investigated experimentally for...

Using powerful lasers, Hui Zhao, assistant professor of physics and astronomy at the University of Kansas, and graduate student Lalani Werake have discovered a new way to recognize currents of spinning electrons within a semiconductor.Their findings could lead the way to development of superior computers and electronics. Results from their work in KU's Ultrafast Laser Lab will be published in the September issue of Nature Physics, a leading peer-reviewed journal, and was posted online in...

Breakthrough paves way to store and process information in novel spin-electronicsProcessing large amounts of information in today's electronics requires large amounts of power, which results in heating. Heat can ruin modern electronics by potentially damaging the stuff that makes them work--the ever smaller and denser structures in a computer's "brain," the microprocessor that incorporates all of its logic functions.So, researchers have been investigating something called...

The best theory for explaining the subatomic world got its start in 1928 when theorist Paul Dirac combined quantum mechanics with special relativity to explain the behavior of the electron. The result was relativistic quantum mechanics, which became a major ingredient in quantum field theory. With a few assumptions and ad hoc adjustments, quantum field theory has proven powerful enough to form the basis of the Standard Model of particles and forces."Even so, it should be remembered that...

Experiment tests underpinnings of quantum field theory, Bose-Einstein statistics of photonsOf all the assumptions underlying quantum mechanics and the theory that describes how particles interact at the most elementary level, perhaps the most basic is that particles are either bosons or fermions. Bosons, such as the particles of light called photons, play by one set of rules; fermions, including electrons, play by another.Seven years ago, University of California, Berkeley, physicists asked a...

For most people, frustration is a condition to be avoided. But for scientists studying certain "frustrated" ensembles of interacting components "“ that is, those which cannot settle into a state that minimizes each interaction "“ it may be the key to understanding a host of puzzling phenomena that affect systems from neural networks and social structures to protein folding and magnetism.Frustration has typically been extremely difficult to study because even systems with...

Discovery supports development of nanoscale magnetic storage devicesThough scientists argue that the emerging technology of spintronics may trump conventional electronics for building the next generation of faster, smaller, more efficient computers and high-tech devices, no one has actually seen the spin"”a quantum mechanical property of electrons"”in individual atoms until now.In a study published as an Advance Online Publication in the journal Nature Nanotechnology on Sunday, physicists...