Nanotechnology combined with superconductivity could pave the way for ’spintronics’

As the ever-increasing power of computer chips brings us closer and closer to the limits of silicon technology, many researchers are betting that the future will belong to “spintronics”: a nanoscale technology in which information is carried not by the electron’s charge, as it is in conventional microchips, but by the electron’s intrinsic spin.

If a reliable way can be found to control and manipulate the spins, these researchers argue, spintronic devices could offer higher data processing speeds, lower electric consumption, and many other advantages over conventional chips–including, perhaps, the ability to carry out radically new quantum computations.

Now, University of Notre Dame physicist Boldizsar Janko and his colleagues believe they have found such a control technique. Their work, funded by the National Science Foundation through a Nanoscale Interdisciplinary Research Team grant, was published in the March 5, 2005, edition of the journal Nature.

Data Storage May Enter New Nanotech Phase

Toroid moment storage in nano-particles would be a true quantum leap in the area of data storage, say researchers. A new phase of matter exhibited in nanorods and nanodisks may enable a thousand-fold increase in memory and data storage. Itsy bitsy rods and disks may be able to store vast numbers of data bits.

A new phase of matter exhibited in nanorods and nanodisks may enable a thousand-fold increase in memory and data storage Latest News about Data Storage, say University of Arkansas physicists Ivan Naumov, Laurent Bellaiche and Huaxiang Fu.

Scientists Make Magnetic Silicon, Advancing Spin Based Computing

CNSE spintronics lab research shows silicon can maintain a permanent magnetic field above room temperature, which could help to develop more effective magnetic semiconductors and future spintronic devices

Scientists at the College of Nanoscale Science and Engineering at the University at Albany announced research that could lay the foundation for using silicon to develop chips with magnetic properties, potentially impacting the development of electron-spin-based or “spintronic” devices.mage: Ferromagnetic hysteresis loops taken at three temperatures measured from the Mn implated Si.
mage: Ferromagnetic hysteresis loops taken at three temperatures measured from the Mn implated Si.

Nanotech device touted to replace transistors in computers

U.S. scientists have developed a layer of molecules just three-billionths of a meter thick that can help store data during a computing operation without using traditional semiconductors and some day could replace the transistor as the building block of all computers.

The technology could produce computers that are thousands of times more powerful than those produced today, Hewlett Packard researchers say in a paper published Tuesday in the Journal of Applied Physics.