Physics News

The integration of single-spin magnetoelectronics into standard silicon technology may soon be possible, if experiments confirm a new theoretical prediction by physicists at the Naval Research Laboratory and the University of Wisconsin-Madison. The researchers predict that a family of well-known silicon surfaces, stabilized by small amounts of gold atoms, is intrinsically magnetic despite having no magnetic elements. None of these surfaces has yet been investigated experimentally for magnetism, but the new predictions are already supported indirectly by existing data. The complete findings of the study are published in the August 24, 2010, issue of the journal Nature Communications.  Silicon provides a unique entry point for combining magnetoelectronics based on single spins with standard electronics technology. If a single-spin device can be built on a silicon wafer, input and output electronics can be directly integrated with the magnetic part of the device. This has been an obstacle for current spintronics