Latest Spintronics Stories

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...

Researchers have taken one more step toward understanding the unique and often unexpected properties of graphene, a two-dimensional carbon material that has attracted interest because of its potential applications in future generations of electronic devices.In the Aug. 8 advance online edition of the journal Nature Physics, researchers from the Georgia Institute of Technology and the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) describe for the first time how the orbits of electrons...

Dr. David Awschalom, professor of physics at the University of California, Santa Barbara has been selected as the recipient of the 2010 Materials Research Society Turnbull award for research funded in large measure by the Air Force Office of Scientific Research.The David Turnbull Award, one of the three highest honors bestowed upon scientists by MRS, will be awarded to Dr. Awschalom at the MRS Fall Meeting in Boston, Ma. for his achievements and leadership in establishing the field of...

Physicists are divided on whether string theory is a viable theory of everything, but many agree that it offers a new way to look at physical phenomena that have otherwise proven difficult to describe. In the past decade, physicists have used string theory to build a connection between quantum and gravitational mechanics, known as gauge/gravity duality.MIT physicists, led by Hong Liu and John McGreevy, have now used that connection to describe a specific physical phenomenon "” the behavior...

Subjected to a 3-point stretch, graphene develops bubbles of quantized electronsGraphene, a sheet of pure carbon heralded as a possible replacement for silicon-based semiconductors, has been found to have a unique and amazing property that could make it even more suitable for future electronic devices.Physicists at the University of California, Berkeley, and the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL) have found that when graphene is stretched in a specific way it sprouts nanobubbles in...

Study of quantum phase changes reveals surprising relationship between magnetism and electricityU.S., German and Austrian physicists studying the perplexing class of materials that includes high-temperature superconductors are reporting this week the unexpected discovery of a simple "scaling" behavior in the electronic excitations measured in a related material. The experiments, which were conducted on magnetic heavy-fermion metals, offer direct evidence of the large-scale...

MILPITAS, Calif., July 21 /PRNewswire/ -- Grandis, Inc., the leader in spin transfer torque random access memory (STT-RAM), today announced it has appointed Mohamad Krounbi as senior vice president of engineering. Drawing on more than 25 years of experience in the magnetic storage industry, including executive and senior management roles at Hitachi GST, Western Digital, Read-Rite and IBM, Krounbi will be responsible for all STT-RAM technology and product development at Grandis and for...

TORONTO and NEW YORK, July 16 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ - Micromem Technologies Inc., (Micromem, the "Company") (OTC BB: MMTIF, CNSX: MRM) and its wholly-owned subsidiary, Micromem Applied Sensor Technologies, Inc. (MAST) (www.mastinc.com), provide the following update on executed manufacturing and supply agreements and other business initiatives that were outlined and discussed in our March, 2010 press release. 1. The Company has delivered all material required to complete the final...

On a quest to discover new states of matter, a team of Princeton University scientists has found that electrons on the surface of specific materials act like miniature superheroes, relentlessly dodging the cliff-like obstacles of imperfect microsurfaces, sometimes moving straight through barriers.The Princeton work represents the first time such behavior of electrons has been tracked and recorded, and hints at the possibilities of speeding up integrated circuits that process information by...