Groundbreaking Semiconductor Compound May Lead to Faster, Smaller Electronics

A groundbreaking semiconductor compound is bringing fresh momentum to the field of spintronics - an emerging technology that may lead to smaller, faster, less power-hungry electronics. Spintronics use both the presence or absence of electrical charge and the 'up' or 'down' magnetic spin of electrons to store information, whereas today's electronics use only electrical charge. Spin-based circuits can be smaller than charge-based circuits, enabling device makers to pack more circuits onto a single processor. Created from a new low symmetry crystal structure, the new semiconductor compound is the first to build spintronic properties into a material that's stable at room temperature and easily tailored to a variety of applications. It could eventually be used as the base material for spintronic processors and other devices, much like silicon is the base for today's computing devices.

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00:00:01 right now I'm researching a very specific type of magnetic semiconductor spintronics is essentially the marriage of magnetic and semiconductor materials. And we're good nice and round so it's essentially one material which incorporates both functionalities the advantage of the Spinpoint conductor versus a regular semiconductor is that you can maintain the orientation of the electron spin in a normal semiconductor not though you cannot maintain the orientation of the spin which means that any information incoded on the spin orientation would be lost during the electron transport

00:00:35 the ferromagnetic phase is what allows you to see the spin and it allows it to essentially stay polarized if you have something that is paramagnetic for example once you turn off the magnetic field it's gone and that's not what you want. spintronics materials can help us stay on the Morse path the Moore's Law somos law states that every couple months you double the number of transistors on a single chip but there's an issue in order to double the number of transistors on a chip you have to make them smaller and smaller because you have to cram in all on the same chip

00:01:10 spintronic materials would combine the logic storage and communication capabilities that are currently separated and it would combine them into one chip the Holy Grail I would save spintronics is quantum computing create new chips to make quantum computing a reality one of the reasons why it's been so hard to make a spintronic material is because the solids arn't liquids they have specific positions in a crystal and it's hard to get them to mix exactly the way you want then I mean lets say you have initially two chairs in the room and you

00:01:42 three people then its basically difficult to seat each person on one chair so in this case for example the people represent atoms if you can add a 3rd independent chair then you should be able to seat all three in a much more ordered fashion what our research allows us to do is buy decoupling the effective lattices the magnetic lattice and the semiconducting lattice we can dope and substitute either one independently of the other its a more systematic approach to studying the fundamental physics As a chemist I think about creating brand new structures that are not

00:02:18 known by anybody so far. In our lab were all over glorified bakers A bake- they do different things right, to make the bread the final product have a certain consistency that's essentially what we do only we kinda change the atoms in it this particles have spikes on their surface we call the Hedgehog particles the presence of this spikes changes a lot of properties