SPINTRONICS: THE SPINNING FUTURE OF HARDWARE DEVICES

SUBMITTED BY: RAVINDER DAHIYA 108080

INDEX
TOPICS PAGE NO.S

1) INTRODUCTION 2) EXPLOITING SPIN CURRENTS 3) WHAT EXACTLY THE SPINNING CURRENT IS? 4) MAGNETIC RAMS(MRAM) BASED ON SPINTRONIC TECHNOLOGY 5) GIANT MAGNETORESISTANCE 6) ADVANCEMENTS IN THE FIELD OF SPINTRONICS PLASTIC MEMORY LASER TECHNIQUE IN SPINTRONICS ORGANIC SEMICONDUCTOR

3 3 6 7 9 10

7) T-SENSORS
8) CONCLUSIONS

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INTRODUCTION:
Information-processing technology has thus far relied on purely charge-based devices--ranging from the now quaint vacuum tube to today's million-transistor microchips. Those conventional electronic devices move electric charges around, ignoring the spin that tags along for the ride on each electron. Magnetism (and hence electron spin) has nonetheless always been important for information storage. For instance, even the earliest computer hard drives used magneto resistance--a change in electrical resistance caused by a magnetic field--to read data stored in magnetic domains. Spintronics, or spin electronics, is the emerging field of technology in which not just the charge, but the spin, of electrons is exploited, is expected to lead to dramatic improvements in electronic systems and devices, such as memory elements, logic elements, spin transistors and spin valves. These improvements include faster processing speeds with less power consumption; non-volatility, where turning off the power doesn't "turn off" the information, and possibly the development of quantum computers. One such idiosyncrasy is a quantum property of the electron known as spin, which is closely related to magnetism. Devices that rely on an electron's spin to perform their functions form the foundation of spintronics It refers to the study of the role played by electron (and more generally nuclear) spin in solid state physics, and possible devices that specifically exploit spin properties. Depending on the relative orientation of the magnetizations in the magnetic layers, the device resistance changes from small (parallel magnetizations) to large (antiparallel magnetizations). This change in resistance (also called magnetoresistance) is used to sense changes in magnetic fields. Recent efforts in GMR technology have also involved magnetic tunnel junction devices where the tunneling current depends on spin orientations of the electrodes. In other words it may be said that spintronics, short for spin electronics, is the study of electron spin in materials in order to better understand its behavior, with the hope of developing an entirely new generation of microelectronic devices. Like charge in a conventional device, spin can exist in one of two states--in this case up or down, rather than on or off. Physicists believe that this quality can be exploited to build smaller (potentially on atomic scale) binary devices that use less power than charge-current-based devices. Furthermore, because of its quantum nature, electron spin may exist not only in the up or down state but also in infinitely many intermediate states depending on the energy of the system. This quality holds the potential for what is in effect highly parallel computation, which could make a quantum computer much faster for certain types of calculations.

EXPLOITING SPIN CURRENTS :

An intuitive notion of how an electron's spin works is suggested by the name itself. Imagine a small electrically charged sphere that is spinning rapidly. The circulating charges on the sphere amount to tiny loops of electric current, which create a magnetic field similar to the earth's magnetic field. Scientists traditionally depict the rotation by a vector, or arrow, that point along the sphere's axis of rotation. Immersing the spinning sphere in an external magnetic field changes its total energy according to how its spin vector is aligned with the field.

In some ways, an electron is just like such a spinning sphere of charge--an electron has a quantity of angular momentum (its "spin") and an associated magnetism, and in an ambient magnetic field its energy depends on how its spin vector is oriented. But there the similarities end and the quantum peculiarities begin. Electrons seem to be ideal dimensionless points, not little spheres, so the simple picture of their spin arising from actual rotation doesn't work. In addition, every electron has exactly the same amount of spin, equal to one half the fundamental quantum unit of angular momentum. That property is hardwired into the mathematics that describes all the elementary particles of matter, a result whose significance and meaning are another story entirely. The bottom line is that the spin, along with a mass and a charge, is a defining characteristic of an electron.

In an ordinary electric current, the spins point at random and play no role in determining the resistance of a wire or the amplification of a transistor circuit. Spintronic devices, in contrast, rely on differences in the transport of "spin up" and "spin down" electrons. In a ferromagnet, such as iron or cobalt, the spins of certain electrons on neighboring atoms tend to line up. In a strongly magnetized piece of iron, this alignment extends throughout much of the metal. When a current passes through the ferromagnet, electrons of one spin direction tend to be obstructed. The result is a spin-polarized current in which all the electron spins point in the other direction. A ferromagnet can even affect the flow of a current in a nearby nonmagnetic metal. For example, present-day read heads in computer hard drives use a device dubbed a spin valve, wherein a layer of a nonmagnetic metal is sandwiched between two ferromagnetic metallic layers. The magnetization of the first layer is fixed, or pinned, but the second ferromagnetic layer is not. As the read head travels along a track of data on a computer disk, the small magnetic fields of the recorded 1's and 0's change the second layer's magnetization back and forth, parallel or antiparallel to the magnetization of the pinned layer. In the parallel case, only electrons that are

oriented in the favored direction flow through the conductor easily. In the antiparallel case, all electrons are impeded. The resulting changes in the current allow GMR read heads to detect weaker fields than their predecessors, so that data can be stored using more tightly packed magnetized spots on a disk, increasing storage densities by a factor of three. Electrons not only carry electric charge, they also behave like spinning tops. And by exploiting a quirk of quantum mechanics, physicists have produced currents of spin without the currents of electricity that, until now, have always accompanied them. The results show how the weird quantum rules that govern the microscopic realm can leave their mark in the macroscopic world. Physicists have been striving to develop technologies that would take advantage of currents of electrons all spinning in the same direction. Such "spintronic" technologies could prove far more powerful than ordinary electronics.One way is to shine a laser on a semiconductor to give some of its electrons a boost. Inside the material, electrons move in "bands," which vaguely resemble the lanes on a congested freeway. The lower-energy valence band is chock full of electrons that cannot move through one another, like cars stuck in a traffic jam. The higher-energy conduction band is normally empty, like the high-occupancy vehicle lane on the highway. The laser light lifts electrons from the valence band into the conduction band, where they travel freely when a voltage is applied to the semiconductor. And if the laser is polarized in just the right way, the flowing electrons will all spin in the same direction. But two laser beams acting in concert can pull off an even niftier trick. They can produce a flow of spin without an applied voltage or any net flow of electricity .The photons in one beam packed exactly half as much energy as those in the other, so an electron could climb from the valence band into the conduction band by absorbing one photon from the high energy beam, or two photons from the low energy beam. That gave electrons two ways to jump from one band to the other. According to quantum mechanics, when a particle can get from one state to another in two ways, the two processes can cancel or reinforce each other, in a phenomenon known as quantum interference. Such interference leads to drastically different results than just adding the rates of the two independent processes. The tag-team lasers affected electrons differently depending on whether the electrons spun clockwise (or "down") or counter-clockwise (or "up") when viewed from above the surface. If the lasers were polarized in perpendicular directions, then, through a complicated interaction, the quantum interference would amplify the flow of spin-up electrons in one direction along the surface and diminish it in the opposite direction. At the same time, it would amplify the flow of spin-down electrons so that it directly opposed the flow of the spin-up ones. Because equal numbers of electrons moved in opposite directions, no net electrical current flowed across the surface. However, because a spin-up electron moving to the right has the same effect as a spin-wn electron moving to the left, the flows of spin reinforced each other, leading to a pure spin current. The two teams used different optical techniques to spot the spin-only currents, which flowed for only a few nanometers.

WHAT EXACTLY THE SPINNING CURRENT IS?

Electrons not only carry electric charge, they also behave like spinning tops. And by exploiting a quirk of quantum mechanics, two teams of physicists have independently produced currents of spin without the currents of electricity that, until now, have always accompanied them. . Physicists have been striving to develop technologies that would take advantage of currents of electrons all spinning in the same direction. Such "spintronic" technologies could prove far more powerful than ordinary electronics. But first, researchers must perfect schemes for creating spin-aligned currents inside semiconductors, the materials sed to make microchips. One way is to shine a laser on a semiconductor to give some of its electrons a boost. Inside the material, electrons move in "bands," which vaguely resemble the lanes on a congested freeway. The lower-energy valence band is chock full of electrons that cannot move through one another, like cars stuck in a traffic jam. The higher-energy conduction band is normally empty, like the high-occupancy vehicle lane on the highway. The laser light lifts electrons from the valence band into the conduction band, where they travel freely when a voltage is applied to the semiconductor. And if the laser is polarized in just the right way, the flowing electrons will all spin in the same direction. But two laser beams acting in concert can pull off an even niftier trick. They can produce a flow of spin without an applied voltage or any net flow of electricity .Researchers shined two overlapping laser beams straight down on to a sample of semiconductor. The photons in one beam packed exactly half as much energy as those in the other, so an electron could climb from the valence band into the conduction band by absorbing one photon from the high energy beam, or two photons from the low energy beam. That gave electrons two ways to jump from one band to the other. According to quantum mechanics, when a particle can get from one state to another in two ways, the two processes can cancel or reinforce each other, in a phenomenon known as quantuminterference. Such interference leads to drastically different results than just adding the rates of the two independent processes. The tag-team lasers affected electrons differently depending on whether the electrons spun clockwise (or "down") or counter-clockwise (or "up") when viewed from above the surface. If the lasers were polarized in perpendicular directions, then, through a complicated interaction, the quantum interference would amplify the flow of spin-up electrons in one direction along the surface and diminish it in the opposite direction. At the same time, it would amplify the flow of spin-down electrons so that it directly opposed the flow of the spin-up ones. Because equal numbers of electrons moved in opposite directions, no net electrical current flowed across the surface. However, because a spin-up electron moving to the right has the same effect as a spin-down electron moving to the left, the flows of spin reinforced each other, leading to a pure spin current. The two teams used different optical techniques to spot the spin-only currents, which flowed for only a few nanometers. "The combination of these papers is really quite elegant," he says. "The data is incontrovertible." Spin-only currents might prove useful for controlling the interactions of light in technologies that shuttle photons instead of electrons,but more immediately they underscore how tiny quantum effects can produce surprising macroscopic effects.

MAGNETIC RAMS(MRAM) BASED ON SPINTRONIC TECHNOLOGY:

Physicists have been quick to see the further possibilities of spin valves. Not only are they highly sensitive magnetic sensors (see Sensors box below), they can also be made to act as switches by flipping the magnetisation in one of the layers. This allows information to be stored as 0s and 1s (magnetisations of the layers parallel or antiparallel) as in a conventional transistor memory device. An obvious application is a magnetic version of a random access memory (RAM) device of the kind used in your computer. The advantage of magnetic random access memory (MRAM) is that it is 'non-volatile' - information isn't lost when the system is switched off. MRAM devices would be smaller, faster, cheaper, use less power and would be much more robust in extreme conditions such as high temperature, or high-level radiation or interference.

Magnetic RAM
Over the past three years or so, researchers around the world have been working hard on a whole range of MRAM devices. A particularly promising device is the magnetic tunnel junction, which has two magnetic layers separated by an insulating metal-oxide layer. Electrons can 'tunnel' through from one layer to the other only when magnetisations of the layers point in the same direction, otherwise the resistance is high - in fact, 1000 times higher than in the standard spin valve. Even more interesting are devices that combine the magnetic layers with semi-conductors like silicon. The advantage is that silicon is still the favourite material of the electronics industry and likely to remain so. Such hybrid devices could be made to behave more like conventional

transistors. They could be used as non-volatile logic elements which could be reprogrammed using software during actual processing to create an entirely new type of very fast computing. The field of spintronics is extremely young and it's difficult to predict how it will evolve. New physics is still being discovered and new materials being developed, such as magnetic semiconductors, and exotic oxides that manifest an even more extreme effect called colossal magnetoresistance. In this way magnets could be the latest materials to be used in quantum information systems following the discovery of unusual spin effects in a fluorine-based compound. It is found that the spins of clusters of atoms in the magnetic compound became aligned or coherent when a magnetic field was applied, in contrast with the behaviour of similar materials. This coherence persisted for up to ten seconds the clusters could have information imprinted on Physicists have long known that lithium holmium fluoride is a ferromagnet, in which the atomic spins are permanently aligned even when there is no external magnetic field. But if the holmium ions are gradually replaced with yttrium ions, this ferromagnetism is suppressed and eventually disappears. This happens because the material becomes increasingly disordered, and eventually becomes a spin glass in which the alignment of the spins is random. But previous studies have shown that in contrast with theory the addition of further yttrium ions destroys this glassy state, and that the material becomes progressively more ordered, especially if its temperature is reduced to near absolute zero. This unusual state is dubbed an anti-glass. Researchers set out to investigate the magnetic properties of this anti-glass state by cooling a centimetre-sized crystal of lithium holmium yttrium fluoride to temperatures of just tens of millikelvins. Then they switched on an oscillating magnetic field and measured the magnetization of the sample for a range of oscillation frequencies, and at several temperatures. In most disordered magnets, the magnetic susceptibility falls as the temperature drops. It was found that the susceptibility of their crystal increased, indicating that the atomic spins had become more closely aligned, or coherent. The shape of the spectra also suggested that the spins in small clusters of atoms had aligned to form oscillators, which could take on either an up or down collective spin. These oscillators each of which contained about 260 atoms kept the same spin for up to ten seconds. The researchers think that this alignment arises because the oscillators can flip between the two possible spin states by tunnelling through the potential barrier that separates them. This could be evidence for quantum behaviour because it cannot be explained by classical theories of magnetism. It is now suggested that it could be possible to encode bits of information onto these two-state oscillators using a magnetic field, and that the states could be entangled and used in quantum information processing. MRAM is bound to bring a great revolution in the field of computer memory. It is more robust, cheaper, faster and non volatile memory. One challenge in realizing magnetic RAM involves addressing individual memory elements, flipping their spins up or down to yield the zeros and ones of binary computer logic. The most commonly envisioned strategy running current pulses through wires to induce magnetic fields that will rotate the elements is flawed, because the fringe fields generated could interfere with neighboring elements. It too has a solution. Using a change in voltage (not current) to flip the memory elements spins produces no magnetic fringe fields. This approach to control offers an inherently better match to spintronic technology. Still in the conceptual stage, voltage-controlled spin rotation is a potentially valuable strategy for the design of magnetic RAM devices.

GIANT MAGNETORESISTANCE:
The prototype device that is already in use in industry as a read head and a memory-storage cell is the giant-magnetoresistive (GMR) sandwich structure which consists of alternating ferromagnetic and nonmagnetic metal layers.. Depending on the relative orientation of the magnetizations in the magnetic layers, the device resistance changes from small (parallel magnetizations) to large (antiparallel magnetizations). This change in resistance (also called magnetoresistance) is used to sense changes in magnetic fields. Recent efforts in GMR technology have also involved magnetic tunnel junction devices where the tunneling current depends on spin orientations of the electrodes Electrons like all fundamental particles have a property called spin which can be orientated in one direction or the other - called 'spin-up' or 'spin-down' - like a top spinning anticlockwise or clockwise. When electron spins are aligned (ie all spin-up or all spin-down) they create a largescale net magnetic moment as seen in magnetic materials like iron and cobalt. Magnetism is an intrinsic physical property associated with the spins of electrons in a material. Magnetism is already exploited in recording devices such as computer hard disks. Data are recorded and stored as tiny areas of magnetised iron or chromium oxide. To access the information, a read head detects the minute changes in magnetic field as the disk spins underneath it. This induces corresponding changes in the head's electrical resistance - an effect called magnetoresistance. Spintronics burst on the scene in 1988 when French and German physicists discovered a much more powerful effect called 'giant magnetoresistance' (GMR). It results from subtle electron-spin effects in ultra-thin 'multilayers' of magnetic materials, which cause huge changes in their electrical resistance when a magnetic field is applied. GMR is 200 times stronger than ordinary magnetoresistance. Sdientists soon realised that read heads incorporating GMR materials would be able to sense much smaller magnetic fields, allowing the storage capacity of a hard disk to increase from 1 to 20 gigabits

A GMR Reader It is possible to make a sandwich of gold atoms between two thin films of magnetic material that will act as a filter or valve that only permits electrons in one of the two states to pass. The filter can be changed from one state to the other using a brief and tiny burst of current. From this simple device its hoped to make incredibly tiny chips that will act as super-fast memories whose contents will survive loss of power. The adjective is spintronic.World Wide Words.The advent of the MRAM and GMR reader have already brought a revolution in the hardware sector and the researches are still continuing to make the dream of superfast, miniature chipped quantum computers which will totally change the way , present day computers work in!

ADVANCEMENTS IN THE FIELD OF SPINTRONICS:

PLASTIC MEMORY: Ohio State University researchers have made nearly all the moving electrons inside a sample of plastic spin in the same direction an effect called spin polarisation that could yield plastic memories. they report achieving spin polarisation using a magnetic field. The team says this is the first step in converting the plastic into a device that could read and write spin-electronic or spintronic data in a working computer. The advent of plastic electronics opens up many opportunities for new technologies such as flexible displays and inexpensive solar cells." his team has shown that all of the components that go into spintronics can be made from plastics: "So it is timely to bring all these components together to make plastic spintronics." Spintronics with traditional inorganic semiconductors is difficult because most such materials are only magnetic at very low temperatures. Creating the cold environment needed would be expensive and space-consuming. The researchers used a plastic called vanadium tetracyanoethanide. The material is magnetic at high temperatures, and would be suitable for use inside a computer operating above room temperature. Conventional electronics encodes computer data based on a binary code of ones and zeros, depending on whether an electron is present in a void within the material. Spintronics is a newer branch of electronics research in which electron spin, as well as charge, is manipulated to yield a desired outcome. Because the spin orientation of conduction electrons survives for a relatively long time, spintronic devices are particularly attractive for memory storage and magnetic sensors applications and potentially for quantum computing, as spin is used extensively in research in this area. Plastic spintronic devices would weigh less than traditional electronic ICs and cost less to manufacture LASER TECHNIQUE IN SPINTRONICS Researchers have demonstrated an optical technique that could provide needed materials data for the development of spintronics, leading to the production of devices based on magnetic spin. Such devices promise advantages over their electronic analogs. An optical technique promises to aid the development of spintronic devices. The graph indicates the periodic changes in the magnetization of one element on a lithographically defined permalloy array, seen in an optical microscope image (inset). Courtesy of Maarten van Kampen. For example, spintronics memory could store data without power, such as on a hard disk, but retrieve it rapidly, such as computer RAM. Before such gizmos appear, however, basic research needs to be done, including identifying methods to detect microscopic magnetic spin. he optical technique may satisfy this requirement. It relies on a one-two laser punch. First, the esearchers focused a 70-fs pulse of 780-nm radiation onto a 10-m-wide area of the film being characterized. The pulse, which had a power of about a nanojoule, induced rapid, localized eating and a corresponding change in magnetization. A second laser pulse, 100 times weaker than the irst, then enabled the researchers to probe the magnetization by measuring the change in the polarization of the reflected radiation. In their experiments, the scientists discovered that the magnetization circled around its undisturbed state like a top as the material cooled. The results indicate that this magnetic precession may be probed from 10 ps to several nanoseconds after the initial pump pulse. Continued probing provided additional information.

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Scientists noted that the wavelength of the technique is not critical and that greater spatial resolution, even submicron resolution, is possible. Because the technique is optical, there is no contact, and local characteristics can be probed. On the other hand, the material must be reflective and reachable by the pulse. It also is not possible to switch the material's magnetic state using this method. The team sees several directions for the research, including investigating means to improve both the optical and magnetic techniques. ORGANIC SEMICONDUCTOR: University of Utah physicists have taken an important step toward a new generation of faster, cheaper computers and electronics by building the first "organic spin valves" electrical switches that integrate two emerging fields of technology: organic semiconductor electronics and spin electronics, or spintronics. In a study published Feb. 26 in the journal Nature, the researchers report they used a semiconductor made of organic material instead of a conventional semiconductor such as silicon to make switch-like valves that can control the flow of electrical current. They were able to change the flow of electricity through the valves by 40 percent. "It's an arly step toward a new generation of miniature electronic devices: computer chips, light-emitting evices for displays, and sensors to detect radiation, air pollutants, light and magnetic fields. Scientists are making progress toward devices that are made with organic materials and utilize a different property of electrons their spin rather than their electrical charge for things like computer memory, computer processors and sensors of various sorts . In electronic devices, information is stored and transmitted by the flow of electricity in the form of negatively charged subatomic particles called electrons. The zeroes and ones of computer binary code are represented by the presence or absence of electrons within a semiconductor or other material. In spintronics, information is stored and transmitted using another property of electrons: their spin. Spin is a difficult concept to explain. Technically, spin is the intrinsic angular momentum of a particle. But an easier way to describe spin is to imagine that each electron contains a tiny bar magnet, like a compass needle, that points either up or down to represent the electron's spin. Electrons moving through a nonmagnetic material normally have rando spins (half are up and half are down) so the net effect is zero. But magnetic fields can be applied so that the spins are aligned (all up or all down), allowing a new way to store binary data in the form of ones (spins all up) and zeroes (spins all down). The field of spintronics was born in the late 1980s with the discovery of the "giant magnetoresistance effect." Resistance is a measure of how much a material resists the flow of electrical current or electrons. The giant magnetoresistance effect occurs when a magnetic field is used to align the spin of electrons in the material, inducing a large change in a material's resistance. The effect first was discovered in a device made of multiple layers of electrically conducting material: alternating magnetic and nonmagnetic layers. The device was known as a "spin valve" because when a magnetic field was applied to the device, the spin of its electrons went from all up to all down, changing its resistance so that the device acted like a valve to increase or decrease the flow of electrical current. Conventional spin valves have been widely used in computers since the mid 1990s. In older computers, electrical current was used by the "read head" to decipher data stored magnetically on the hard drive. Modern computer read heads are spin valves that are far more sensitive at reading data stored on a hard drive, allowing high-density, high-speed hard drives that store more data and can be read more quickly.Spintronics "has quickly revolutionized magnetic recording technology and is going to revolutionize random access memory (RAM) made of semiconductors.

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Compared with purely electronic computers, computers with spintronic memory should be able to store more data, consume less power and process data more quickly. Conventional computer memory has transistors that use electric charges to store data as zeroes and ones. Spintronic memory will use up and down electron spins to represent such data. Spintronics also should make instant-on computers possible. Once the spins are aligned, they stay that way until changed by a magnetic field even if a computer is shut off. As a result, data will be available the moment a computer is turned back on, with no need to boot up the computer to move data from the hard drive to the memory. Major electronics companies now are developing spinvalve memory chips, which will show up first in cellular phones and digital cameras. The Study: Spintronics and Organic Semiconductors Get Married The next step in spintronics is to combine the advantages of spin-based devices with the qualities of semiconductors, such as their ability to be "doped" with substances that make them carry more or less electricity, or make them able to emit light .But researchers have made little progress so far in integrating the magnetic materials of spintronics with conventional semiconductors such as silicon or gallium arsenide. A major problem is that conventional semiconductors must be fabricated at high temperatures, making it difficult to produce the ultra-thin layers necessary to make a spin valve. So researchers set out to show that it is possible to create a spin valve made with an organic semiconductor rather than a conventional semiconductor. Compared with conventional semiconductors, organic semiconductors are inexpensive and simpler to make, can be manufactured at lower temperatures with fewer toxic wastes, have electronic properties that can be adjusted, and are flexible so they can be molded to desired shapes. Organic semiconductors already are used as light-emitting diodes for some flat-screen Tvs, cell phone displays, some billboards and a few computer display screens. Scientists built three-layer organic spin valves using a middle layer made from an organic semiconductor named 8-hydroxyquinoline aluminum, or Alq3, which now is used in certain lightemitting diodes and is being developed for use in TV screens.The organic semiconductor was sandwiched between two metallic layers: one made of cobalt and the other a compound named lanthanum strontium manganese oxide. The two metals acted as electrodes, injecting electrons with the desired spin into the middle, organic semiconductor layer. The spin valve is on a chip that measures about one-third inch square.The physicists successfully injected electrons with aligned spins into the organic semiconductor and showed that the spins stayed aligned as the electrons moved through the semiconductor. By applying a weak magnetic field to the organic spin valve, the physicists caused a 40 percent change in the electrical current flowing through the valve. That qualifies as giant magnetoresistance. The researchers also showed the spin-up or spin-down alignment of electrons was maintained when power was shut off a property essential for spintronic computer memory. More work is added to develop organic spin valves that operate at higher temperatures, something that might be accomplished by removing impurities from the organic semiconductor. The spin valves in the study operated at temperatures ranging from minus 440 degrees Fahrenheit to minus 40 degrees Fahrenheit (minus 262 degrees Celsius to minus 40 degrees Celsius). Nevertheless, the experiment "sets a stage for more practical applications," Shi says. "Organic semiconductors can be used for spintronic devices such as spin valves, spin light-emitting diodes and spin transistors." Those devices can be used in computer memory chips and sensors to detect air pollution, magnetic fields, radiation or light, Vardeny says. For example, a conventional semiconductor transistor amplifies electric current and that's about it.But an organic semiconductor can be designed so that its electron spins go from aligned to nonaligned when it is exposed to light, air pollution or radiation, changing the flow of electric current to trigger an alarm.

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T-SENSORS: One of the challenges to cramming more information onto computer hard drives is making a sensor sensitive enough to measure the presence or absence of a magnetic field in a microscopic bit of material. Reading a bit means sensing if its magnetic field affects the flow of electrons through an electric circuit. If the magnetic field is strong enough to change a sensor's electron flow, the bit represents a 1, if not, it is a 0. The smaller the bit, the smaller its magnetic field, and the harder it is to sense the difference between a 1 and a 0. Researchers have used an effect dubbed ballistic magnetoresistance to make a tiny prototype sensor that is 15 times as sensitive as the giant magnetoresistance sensors used in today's disk drives. The T-shaped sensor consists of a pair of wires connected by only a few hundred atoms. Because the sensor is very small as well as sensitive, it could be used to read tiny, closely packed bits. Due to the nanoscale of the sensor, bit size can be reduced to... terabit-per-squareinch densities. A terabit is 125 gigabytes, and a DVD holds 4 gigabytes. A CD-sized magnetic disk with such small bits could hold 1,800 gigabytes, or about 450 DVDs worth of information. The key to making sensors that can read smaller bits is increasing the magnetoresistance of the sensor, or read head, used to distinguish the magnetic states of the bits. The higher a material's magnetoresistance, the greater the difference in the number of electrons flowing through it when it is surrounded by a magnetic field versus when it is not. If the difference is significant, it can be used to distinguish weak magnetic fields like those of very small bits that represent 1's from bits that have no magnetic field and represent 0's. Ballistic magnetoresistance produces a greater difference between 1 and 0 signals and other types of magnetoresistance, but the challenges to using it in disk drives is that it works best with either very strong magnetic fields or extremely low temperatures. Strong magnetic fields can't be used with small bits, and a low-temperature requirement makes for impractical devices. The researchers got around these potential restrictions when they discovered that the right size and shape of the contact point in the tiny wires of a sensor increases the ballistic magnetoresistance effect to the point where it can be used with weak magnetic fields at room temperature. The researchers' ballistic sensor consists of two nickel wires 125 microns in diameter connected to form a T. A micron is a thousandth of a millimeter, and a human hair is about 75 microns thick. The researchers sharpened the end of one wire at the T junction to a 40-nanometer point to make an extremely small contact between the two wires. A nanometer is one thousandth of a micron, or about the length of 10 hydrogen atoms in a row. When the sensor is in a magnetic field, the magnetic orientations of its electrodes align, making current flow more easily. In addition, electrons flow even more easily through the sensor because of its small size. As electrons flow through materials like metal, they ordinarily scatter, bouncing in different directions. An electrical current arises when the average of all the movement is a flow in one direction. In wires only a few nanometers wide, however, the scattering stops and electrons flow straight through, or ballistically. The sensor allows electrons to flow this way because the contact surface at the T junction between the electrodes is only a few hundred atoms In the absence of a magnetic field, the magnetic orientations of the electrodes in the researchers' sensor are opposite, which increases the device's resistance to electrical currents. The sensor's small size also gives it an an advantage where resistance is concerned. Electrons have spin, which is similar to a magnet's North and South poles. If an electron's spin is aligned with the magnetic orientation of an electrode, it can pass through. If not, it is blocked. If the contact between the sensor's electrodes were larger, a few electrons would reorient their spins

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and pass through, reducing the resistance. But because the contact is so small, the electrons don't have time to reorient, which gives the device a higher resistance. The combination of ballistic electron flow in the presence of a magntic field and greater resistance in the absence of a magnetic field means a greater difference in electron flow than is possible with today's giant magnetoresistance devices. This makes for a more sensitive sensor. n low magnetic fields at room temperature, the electrical resistance of the researchers' sensor is 33 times greater than when no magnetic field is present, allowing the sensor to read bits so small that one trillion of them could fit in a square inch, according to Chopra. Previous ballistic magnetoresistance experiments have yielded increases in resistance of as much as seven times. The giant magnetoresistance used in today's disk drives doubles electrical resistance. Making practical storage devices that use ballistic magnetoresistance should be fairly straightforward because it is similar to giant magnetoresistance, said Chopra. Giant magnetoresistance devices use two thin layers of magnetic material separated by an even thinner non-magnetic layer. Because the magnetic layers have opposite magnetic orientations, passing a current of electrons through both layers is difficult: one layer blocks electrons that have one spin orientation while the other layer blocks electrons of the other orientation. Adding a magnetic field causes the magnetic orientations of the two layers to align and so block electrons of only one spin orientation.The good news is that the effect is like giant magnetoresistance except it is... huge and it comes packed in a sensor size that is atomic scale More work needs to be done to closely control the stronger ballistic effect and assess its longterm stability, he added. The device's strong effect at room temperature and in small magnetic fields makes it potentially very interesting" for data storage technology, said Caroline Ross, a professor of materials science and engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. "We still need to understand exactly the mechanism for the effect . The tiny contact point between the wires forces the boundary of the magnetic field to be very narrow, effectively blocking electrons. Hence this phenomenon is a direct result of the small size of the contact. The ballistic magnetoresistance the researchers produced could be used in practical applications in 4 to 6 years.

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CONCLUSIONS: As rapid progress in the miniaturization of semiconductor electronic devices leads toward chip features smaller than 100 nanometers in size, device engineers and physicists are inevitably faced with the looming presence of quantum mechanics--that counterintuitive and sometimes mysterious realm of physics wherein wavelike properties dominate the behavior of electrons.One such idiosyncrasy is a quantum property of the electron known as spin, which is closely related to magnetism. Devices that rely on an electron's spin to perform their functions form the foundation of spintronics (short for spin-based electronics), also known as magnetoelectronics. Information-processing technology has thus far relied on purely charge-based devices--ranging from the now quaint vacuum tube to today's million-transistor microchips. Those conventional electronic devices move electric charges around, ignoring the spin that tags along for the ride on each electron. Magnetism (and hence electron spin) has nonetheless always been important or information storage. For instance, even the earliest computer hard drives used magnetoresistance--a change in electrical resistance caused by a magnetic field--to read data stored in magnetic domains. It is no surprise that the information storage industry has provided the initial successes in spintronics technology. Most laptop computers now come fitted with highcapacity hard drives that pack an unprecedented amount of data into each square millimeter. The drives rely on a spintronic effect, giant magnetoresistance (GMR), to read such dense data.n today's read heads and MRAMs, key features are made of ferromagnetic metallic alloys. Such metal-based devices make up the first--and most mature--of three categories of spintronics. In the second category, the spin-polarized currents flow in semiconductors instead of metals. Achieving practical spintronics in semiconductors would allow a wealth of existing microelectronics techniques to be co-opted and would also unleash many more types of devices made possible by semiconductors' high-quality optical properties and their ability to amplify both optical and electrical signals. Examples include ultrafast switches and fully programmable allspintronics microprocessors. This avenue of research may lead to a new class of multifunctional electronics that combine logic, storage and communications on a single chip.it makes sense instead to build on the extensive foundations of conventional electronic semiconductor technology. Indeed, a recent series of unexpected discoveries appears to support our hunch that semiconductor spintronics provides a feasible path for developing quantum computers and other quantum information machines. Whether one looks at the near term for tomorrow's consumer electronics or at the more distant prospect of quantum computing, spintronics promises to be revolutionary.A ferromagnet can even affect the flow of a current in a nearby nonmagnetic metal. For example, present-day read heads in computer hard drives use a device dubbed a spin valve, wherein a layer of a nonmagnetic metal is sandwiched between two ferromagnetic metallic layers. The magnetization of the first layer is fixed, or pinned, but the second ferromagnetic layer is not. As the read head travels along a track of data on a computer disk, the small magnetic fields of the recorded 1's and 0's change the second layer's magnetization back and forth, parallel or antiparallel to the magnetization of the pinned layer. In the parallel case, only electrons that are oriented in the favored direction flow through the conductor easily. In the antiparallel case, all electrons are impeded. The resulting changes in the current allow GMR read heads to detect weaker fields than their predecessors, so that data can be stored using more tightly packed magnetized spots on a disk, increasing storage densities by a factor of three.Whereas the metallic spintronic devices just described provide new ways to store information, semiconductor spintronics may offer even more interesting possibilities. Because conventional semiconductors are not ferromagnetic, one might wonder how semiconductor spintronic devices can work at all. One solution employs a ferromagnetic metal to inject a spin-polarized current into a semiconductor. The most exciting developments in semiconductor spintronics will probably be devices we have not imagined yet. A key research question for this second category of spintronics is how well electrons can maintain a specific spin state when traveling through a semiconductor or crossing from one material to another. For instance, a spin FET will not work unless the electrons remain polarized on entering the channel and after traveling to its far end.

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REFERENCES:

1. http://www.techtransfer.anl.gov 2. http://www.europhysicsnews.com 3. http://www.nature.com 4. http://www.eet.com 5. http://www.theories5.physik.unibas.ch 6. http://www.sciam.com 7. http://www.IEEE.com

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