A study has provided new insight into spintronics, which has been hailed as the successor to the transistor.According to the Cavendish Laboratory, the University of Cambridge's Department of Physics, spintronics, which exploits the electron's tiny magnetic moment, or "spin", could radically change computing due to its potential of high-speed, high-density and low-power consumption.
Spintronics research attempts to develop a spin-based electronic technology that will replace the charge-based technology of semiconductors.
While conventional technology relies on harnessing the charge of electrons, the field of spintronics depends instead on the manipulation of electrons' spin.
One of the unique properties in spintronics is that spins can be transferred without the flow of electric charge currents.
This is called "spin current" and unlike other concepts of harnessing electrons, the spin current can transfer information without generating heat in electric devices.
The major remaining obstacle to a viable spin current technology is the difficulty of creating a volume of spin current large enough to support current and future electronic devices.
However, the new Cambridge researchers in close collaboration with Professor Sergej Demokritov group at the University of Muenster, Germany, have, in part, addressed this issue.
In order to create enhanced spin currents, the researchers used the collective motion of spins called spin waves (the wave property of spins). By bringing spin waves into interaction, they have demonstrated a new, more efficient way of generating spin current.
"You can find lots of different waves in nature, and one of the fascinating things is that waves often interact with each other. Likewise, there are a number of different interactions in spin waves," Dr Hidekazu Kurebayashi, from the Microelectronics Group at the Cavendish Laboratory, said.
"Our idea was to use such spin wave interactions for generating efficient spin currents," Kurebayashi explained.
According to their findings, one of the spin wave interactions (called three-magnon splitting) generates spin current ten times more efficiently than using pre-interacting spin waves.
Additionally, the findings link the two major research fields in spintronics, namely the spin current and the spin wave interaction.
