OT-New Discovery Could Pave the Way for Spin-based Computing

Novel oxide-based magnetism follows electrical commands

Joe Miksch

 http://www.news.pitt.edu/news/new-discovery-could-pave-way-spin-based-computing

PITTSBURGH—Electricity and magnetism rule our digital world. Semiconductors process electrical information, while magnetic materials enable long-term data storage. A University of Pittsburgh research team has discovered a way to fuse these two distinct properties in a single material, paving the way for new ultrahigh density storage and computing architectures.

WhileMagnetic states at oxide interfaces controlled by electricity. Top image show magnetic state with -3 volts applied, and bottom image shows nonmagnetic state with 0 volts applied. phones and laptops rely on electricity to process and temporarily store information, long-term data storage is still largely achieved via magnetism. Discs coated with magnetic material are locally oriented (e.g. North or South to represent “1” and “0”), and each independent magnet can be used to store a single bit of information. However, this information is not directly coupled to the semiconductors used to process information. Having a magnetic material that can store and process information would enable new forms of hybrid storage and processing capabilities.

Such a material has been created by the Pitt research team led by Jeremy Levy, a Distinguished Professor of Condensed Matter Physics in Pitt’s Kenneth P. Dietrich School of Arts and Sciences and director of the Pittsburgh Quantum Institute.

Levy, other researchers at Pitt, and colleagues at the University of Wisconsin-Madison today published their work in Nature Communications, elucidating their discovery of a form of magnetism that can be stabilized with electric fields rather than magnetic fields. The University of Wisconsin-Madision researchers were led by Chang-Beom Eom, the Theodore H. Geballe Professor and Harvey D. Spangler Distinguished Professor in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering. Working with a material formed from a thick layer of one oxide—strontium titanate—and a thin layer of a second material—lanthanum aluminate—these researchers have found that the interface between these materials can exhibit magnetic behavior that is stable at room temperature. The interface is normally conducting, but by “chasing” away the electrons with an applied voltage (equivalent to that of two AA batteries), the material becomes insulating and magnetic. The magnetic properties are detected using “magnetic force microscopy,” an imaging technique that scans a tiny magnet over the material to gauge the relative attraction or repulsion from the magnetic layer.

The newly discovered magnetic properties come on the heels of a previous invention by Levy, so-called “Etch-a-Sketch Nanoelectronics” involving the same material. The discovery of magnetic properties can now be combined with ultra-small transistors, terahertz detectors, and single-electron devices previously demonstrated.

“This work is indeed very promising and may lead to a new type of magnetic storage,” says Stuart Wolf, head of the nanoSTAR Institute at the University of Virginia. Though not an author on this paper, Wolf is widely regarded as a pioneer in the area of spintronics.

“Magnetic materials tend to respond to magnetic fields and are not so sensitive to electrical influences,” Levy says. “What we have discovered is that a new family of oxide-based materials can completely change its behavior based on electrical input.”

This discovery was supported by grants from the National Science Foundation, the Air Force Office of Scientific Research, and the Army Research Office.

Semi-OT Team first to detect exciton in metal

Interferogram of the photoelectron counts versus photoelectron energy and time delay between interferometrically scanned pump–probe pulses. Credit: Nature Physics, DOI: 10.1038/nphys2981

 http://phys.org/news/2014-06-team-exciton-metal.html#jCp

University of Pittsburgh researchers have become the first to detect a fundamental particle of light-matter interaction in metals, the exciton. The team will publish its work online June 1 in Nature Physics.

Mankind has used reflection of light from a metal mirror on a daily basis for millennia, but the quantum mechanical magic behind this familiar phenomenon is only now being uncovered.

Physicists describe physical phenomena in terms of interactions between fields and particles, says lead author Hrvoje Petek, Pitt's Richard King Mellon Professor in the Department of Physics and Astronomy within Kenneth P. Dietrich School of Arts and Sciences. When light (an electromagnetic field) reflects from a metal mirror, it shakes the metal's free electrons (the particles), and the consequent acceleration of electrons creates a nearly perfect replica of the incident light (the reflection).

The classical theory of electromagnetism provides a good understanding of inputs and outputs of this process, but a microscopic quantum mechanical description of how the light excites the electrons is lacking.

Petek's team of experimental and theoretical physicists and chemists from the University of Pittsburgh and Institute of Physics in Zagreb, Croatia, report on how light and matter interact at the surface of a silver crystal. They observe, for the first time, an exciton in a metal.

Excitons, particles of light-matter interaction where light photons become transiently entangled with electrons in molecules and semiconductors, are known to be fundamentally important in processes such as plant photosynthesis and optical communications that are the basis for the Internet and cable TV. The optical and electronic properties of metals cause excitons to last no longer than approximately 100 attoseconds (0.1 quadrillionth of a second). Such short lifetimes make it difficult for scientists to study excitons in metals, but it also enables reflected light to be a nearly perfect replica of the incoming light.

Yet, Branko Gumhalter at the Institute of Physics predicted, and Petek and his team experimentally discovered, that the surface electrons of silver crystals can maintain the excitonic state more than 100 times longer than the bulk metal, enabling the excitons in metals to be experimentally captured by a newly developed multidimensional coherent spectroscopic technique.

The ability to detect excitons in metals sheds light on how light is converted to electrical and chemical energy in plants and solar cells, and in the future it may enable metals to function as active elements in optical communications. In other words, it may be possible to control how light is reflected from a metal.

 Explore further: Quasi-particle swap between graphene layers

Research team says communication technologies including smartphones and laptops could now be 1,000 times faster

http://www.nanowerk.com/news/newsid=24516.php (Nanowerk News) Many of the communication tools of today rely on the function of light or, more specifically, on applying information to a light wave. Up until now, studies on electronic and optical devices with materials that are the foundations of modern electronics—such as radio, TV, and computers—have generally relied on nonlinear optical effects, producing devices whose bandwidth has been limited to the gigahertz (GHz) frequency region. (Hertz stands for cycles per second of a periodic phenomenon, in this case 1billion cycles). Thanks to research performed at the University of Pittsburgh, a physical basis for terahertz bandwidth (THz, or 1 trillion cycles per second)—the portion of the electromagnetic spectrum between infrared and microwave light—has now been demonstrated.

In a paper published March 4 in Nature Photonics ("Frequency comb generation at terahertz frequencies by coherent phonon excitation in silicon"), Hrvoje Petek, a professor of physics and chemistry in Pitt's Kenneth P. Dietrich School of Arts and Sciences, and his colleague Muneaki Hase, a professor of applied physics at the University of Tsukuba in Japan and a visiting scientist in Petek's lab, detail their success in generating a frequency comb—dividing a single color of light into a series of evenly spaced spectral lines for a variety of uses—that spans a more than 100 terahertz bandwidth by exciting a coherent collective of atomic motions in a semiconductor silicon crystal.

"The ability to modulate light with such a bandwidth could increase the amount of information carried by more than 1,000 times when compared to the volume carried with today's technologies," says Petek. "Needless to say, this has been a long-awaited discovery in the field."

To investigate the optical properties of a silicon crystal, Petek and his team investigated the change in reflectivity after excitation with an intense laser pulse. Following the excitation, the team observed that the amount of reflected light oscillates at 15.6 THz, the highest mechanical frequency of atoms within a silicon lattice. This oscillation caused additional change in the absorption and reflection of light, multiplying the fundamental oscillation frequency by up to seven times to generate the comb of frequencies extending beyond 100 THz. Petek and his team were able to observe the production of such a comb of frequencies from a crystalline solid for the first time.

"Although we expected to see the oscillation at 15.6 THz, we did not realize that its excitation could change the properties of silicon in such dramatic fashion," says Petek. "The discovery was both the result of developing unique instrumentation and incisive analysis by the team members."

Petek notes the team's achievements are the result of developing experimental and theoretical tools to better understand how electrons and atoms interact in solids under intense optical excitation and of the invested interest by Pitt's Dietrich School in advanced instrumentation and laboratory infrastructure.

The team is currently investigating the coherent oscillation of electrons, which could further extend the ability of harnessing light-matter interactions from the terahertz- to the petahertz-frequency range. Petahertz is a unit of measure for very fast frequencies (1 quadrillion hertz).

Source: University of Pittsburgh