The yet to be revealed spin

A device with tiny dimensions built at Bar Ilan University, stars in one of the hot fields of nanotechnology - spintronics. This is a promising new field that will enable the production of energy-saving processors over time.

Imagine that in the middle of a long flight, you are preparing material for an important meeting that is going to take place immediately after the flight and your computer stops - the battery's activity time is over. Or another case - you arrive at the client, turn on the computer and find yourself waiting; When will the computer come up?! Dr. Amos Sharoni from the Institute of Nanotechnology and Advanced Materials at Bar-Ilan University may have an answer to this. Research that he conducts may lead to a new processor technology that will also be energy efficient and allow work for many times longer than today without the need to turn off the computer. The name of the game is spintronics.

"The challenge is to uncover the untapped potential of the electron - the basic unit of electric charge," explains Sharoni. "Almost all electronic products today are based on the use of electrons to perform calculations and supply operating power. The computers, for the purpose of transferring information, rely on the transfer of electric charge through a semiconductor such as silicon. What is less known is that in addition to the charge, the electron is equipped with another property called 'spin' - a kind of small magnet attached to the electron." Scientists believe that the spin, which is actually one of two directions an electron can adopt in the presence of a magnetic field, can be used to produce a new generation of computers with high memory and computational power. "In our research we hope to better understand how to produce, drive and measure the spin properties," adds Sharoni.

One of the things that slows down the speed of computing today is the situation where the elements responsible for memory (RAM) and computational processing are separated from each other. Spintronics will make it possible to combine computing and fast memory in one device. In addition, the reason for the slow operation of the computer is the need to transfer information from the slow permanent memory (the hard disk) to the fast RAM memory which does not work without electricity. In the integrated spintronics devices, there will be no need to turn on the computer because the information will be stored in the high-speed memory and will be available for immediate work. Spintronics has already led to the creation of memories on a hard disk with a huge volume (over a terabit), however, the potential inherent in spintronics is much greater and has not yet been used.

Sharoni emphasizes that in-depth basic research is needed before going to the production line of the first spintronic computer. One of the main problems is that in the field of materials used today, the spin is unstable and the electrons tend to "jump" in both directions between the magnetic poles. However, and here is Sharoni's contribution, if suitable materials are found and a device of sufficiently small dimensions is made from them, the magnetic properties of the electrons are stable. how tiny This is the nano field. One nanometer is one-thousandth of the thickness of a hair, and the dimensions of the components should be several tens to hundreds of nanometers. Sharoni and a team of researchers are already working on this in the institute's laboratories using state-of-the-art manufacturing equipment and clean rooms.

"In the nano world we can learn about effects that disappear in larger dimensions", explains Sharoni. "When the size of the materials is in the range of a few nanometers, the electronic spin is stable and measurable. In our laboratory, we have developed a process for obtaining a thin coating from which we produce a multi-layered material - something like a nanometric sandwich, which allows us to take advantage of the stability to produce spin-based electronic devices, similar to the computer's hard disk, but with greater power. Using these materials and new understandings, we hope to increase the signal of spintronics devices, which is currently very small and clouds the production capacity of integrated devices."