Computer memory and processing on a single chip

The promising experiment will provide new ways to develop electronic devices and a major breakthrough in spintronics. – Reuters Photo LONDON: Scientists have devised a way to manipulate a magnetically polarized current by electric fields which opens new prospect of simultaneously processing and storing data on a single chip. The Researchers from Queen Mary, University of London (UK) and University of Fribourg (Switzerland) have published their research in the journal Nature Materials which made possible to do processing and storing data on electrons at molecular level on the chips. The technology is a part of emerging field of 'Spintronics' – or spin transport electronics. “This is especially exciting, as this discovery has been made with flexible organic semiconductors, which are set to be the new generation of displays for mobile devices, TVs and computer monitors, and could offer a step-change in power efficiency and reduced weight of these devices,” said Dr Alan Drew on the website of Queen Mary’s School of Physics, who led the research. Dr Drew and his colleagues have investigated the layers of Lithium Fluoride (LiF) – a material that has an intrinsic electric field which can modify the spin of electrons or to control the spin with electric fields. The technique was performed at the Paul Scherrer Institute, which is the only institute in the world which provides this sort of facilities. Here, physicists performed the technique on magnetic properties of muons which are considered as unstable subatomic particles. “In such an experiment the muons are shot into the material and when they decay, the decay products carry information about the magnetic processes inside the material,” explains Professor Elvezio Morenzoni from PSI, where the technique has been developed. “The unique thing about low energy muons is that they can be placed specifically in a particular layer of a multi-layer system. Thus using this method one can study the magnetism in any single layer separately.” The experiment provided a practical leap of a theoretical field and thus opens new vistas for spintronics based devices.