'Spintronic' Devices Coming from Caltech 17
An anonymous reader writes "Boffins at Caltech and UC Santa Barbara say a basic discovery in magnetic semiconductors could result in a new generation of "spintronic" devices. The physicists say the new phenomenon, called the giant planar Hall effect, has to do with what happens when the spins of current-carrying electrons are manipulated. Practical applications? New paradigms in information storage, magnetic logic to replace transistors as switches in certain applications and possibly use of the quantum states of the spins themselves for logic gates in future quantum computers. Found in the Science Blog."
More lies! (Score:5, Funny)
Re:More lies! (Score:4, Funny)
Re:More lies! (Score:2)
Slashdot, news from 90's (Score:1)
hopey
nowhere near practical (Score:3, Interesting)
Or, in other words, even if someone figures out how to inject spin currents from a ferromagnetic metal into a semiconductor (real unlikely, IMHO), then they aren't going to be stable without being spin currents from a ferromagnetic metal into a semiconductor.
TYPO -- doh! (Score:3, Informative)
What I meant to write, before pasting it over with the wrong buffer on edit, was:
in other words, even if someone figures out how to inject spin currents from a ferromagnetic metal into a semiconductor (real unlikely, IMHO), then they aren't going to be stable without being dunked in a tank of liquid nitrogen.
Time for a new set of edit key bindings I guess.
Re:TYPO -- doh! (Score:1)
quantum computing (Score:1)
heh. You can kiss your gpg goodbye.
Looong way to go. (Score:5, Informative)
I'm not an expert in semiconductor physics, but from general look, it seems that:
the article (and discovery) needs to be evaluated by other people - we had hoaxes like that before,
the technology is kind of useless right now.
The latter comes from the fact that it requires ferromagnetic semiconductors - as yet we don't have too many of those that work at reasonable temperatures - room temperatures at least and +200oF to make it useful for any computer chips. Those that were used in article have Curie point at 45oK. (Curie point is the temperature below which a material becomes ferromagnetic and above which it loses those properties. This is due to crystalization of the material - iron normally consists of many crystals that serve as little magnets. Each crystal normally points in a random direction which makes it non-magnetic. After magnetizing, they point in the same direction and create a magnet. At certain temperature - different for different materials, the material loses internal crystalline structure and ceases to have ferromagnetic properties - crystals melt away.) 45oK is a bit too low for any practical purposes with wide application. I'm not sure how high can they go at the moment. If that is comparable to superconductors, there aren't any great chances to see wide applications of that. Even if we obtain high-temperature ferromagnetic semiconductors, there is no guarantee that the effect will hold in higher temperatures. Also, the temperatures are so low, that there might be some superconducting effect involved.
Re:Looong way to go. (Score:2)
I don't know that it is all that useless right now. If I were a three letter agency with a need to factor thousand digit numbers, I don't think needing to run the computer in a bath of liquid helium would be much of a drawback. Remember, most mainframes used to have a special building built for them.
We could harness this phenomenon... (Score:1)
Imagine the possibilities, we could have Exabytes of data passing through every second at a fraction of the current cost of DSL. /sarcasm