World's Smallest Magnetic Field Sensor: Researchers Explore Using Organic Molecules as Electronic Components

For the first time, a team of scientists from KIT and the Institut de Physique et Chimie des Matériaux de Strasbourg (IPCMS) have now succeeded in combining the concepts of spin electronics and molecular electronics in a single component consisting of a single molecule. Components based on this principle have a special potential, as they allow for the production of very small and highly efficient magnetic field sensors for read heads in hard disks or for non-volatile memories in order to further increase reading speed and data density.

Use of organic molecules as electronic components is being investigated extensively at the moment. Miniaturization is associated with the problem of the information being encoded with the help of the charge of the electron (current on or off). However, this requires a relatively high amount of energy. In spin electronics, the information is encoded in the intrinsic rotation of the electron, the spin. The advantage is that the spin is maintained even when switching off current supply, which means that the component can store information without any energy consumption.

The German-French research team has now combined these concepts. The organic molecule H₂-phthalocyanin that is also used as blue dye in ball pens exhibits a strong dependence of its resistance, if it is trapped between spin-polarized, i.e. magnetic electrodes. This effect was first observed in purely metal contacts by Albert Fert and Peter Grünberg. It is referred to as giant magnetoresistance and was acknowledged by the Nobel Prize for Physics in 2007.

The giant magnetoresistance effect on single molecules was demonstrated at KIT within the framework of a combined experimental and theoretical project of CFN and a German-French graduate school in cooperation with the IPCMS, Strasbourg. The results of the scientists are now presented in the journalNature Nanotechnology.

Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) is a public corporation and state institution of Baden-Wuerttemberg, Germany. It fulfills the mission of a university and the mission of a national research center of the Helmholtz Association. KIT focuses on a knowledge triangle that links the tasks of research, teaching, and innovation.

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Next-Generation Electronic Devices: Conduction, Surface States in Topological Insulator Nanoribbons Controlled

Perhaps most importantly, the surfaces of topological insulators enable the transport of spin-polarized electrons while preventing the"scattering" typically associated with power consumption, in which electrons deviate from their trajectory, resulting in dissipation.

Because of such characteristics, these materials hold great potential for use in future transistors, memory devices and magnetic sensors that are highly energy efficient and require less power.

In a study published Feb. 13 inNature Nanotechnology, researchers from UCLA's Henry Samueli School of Engineering and Applied Science and from the materials division of Australia's University of Queensland show the promise of surface-conduction channels in topological insulator nanoribbons made of bismuth telluride and demonstrate that surface states in these nanoribbons are"tunable" -- able to be turned on and off depending on the position of the Fermi level.

"Our finding enables a variety of opportunities in building potential new-generation, low-dissipation nanoelectronic and spintronic devices, from magnetic sensing to storage," said Kang L. Wang, the Raytheon Professor of Electrical Engineering at UCLA Engineering, whose team carried out the research.

Bismuth telluride is well known as a thermoelectric material and has also been predicted to be a three-dimensional topological insulator with robust and unique surface states. Recent experiments with bismuth telluride bulk materials have also suggested two-dimensional conduction channels originating from the surface states. But it has been a great challenge to modify surface conduction, because of dominant bulk contribution due to impurities and thermal excitations in such small-band-gap semiconductors.

The development of topological insulator nanoribbons has helped. With their large surface-to-volume ratios, these nanoribbons significantly enhance surface conditions and enable surface manipulation by external means.

Wang and his team used thin bismuth telluride nanoribbons as conducting channels in field-effect transistor structures. These rely on an electric field to control the Fermi level and hence the conductivity of a channel. The researchers were able to demonstrate for the first time the possibility of controlling surface states in topological insulator nanostructures.

"We have demonstrated a clear surface conduction by partially removing the bulk conduction using an external electric field," said Faxian Xiu, a UCLA staff research associate and lead author of the study."By properly tuning the gate voltage, very high surface conduction was achieved, up to 51 percent, which represents the highest values in topological insulators."

"This research is very exciting because of the possibility to build nanodevices with a novel operating principle," said Wang, who is also associate director of the California NanoSystems Institute (CNSI) at UCLA."Very similar to the development of graphene, the topological insulators could be made into high-speed transistors and ultra-high-sensitivity sensors."

The new findings shed light on the controllability of the surface spin states in topological insulator nanoribbons and demonstrate significant progress toward high surface electric conditions for practical device applications. The next step for Wang's team is to produce high-speed devices based on their discovery.

"The ideal scenario is to achieve 100 percent surface conduction with a complete insulating state in the bulk," Xiu said."Based on the current work, we are targeting high-performance transistors with power consumption that is much less than the conventional complementary metal-oxide semiconductors (CMOS) technology used typically in today's electronics."

Study collaborators Jin Zou, a professor of materials engineering at the University of Queensland; Yong Wang, a Queensland International Fellow; and Zou's team at the division of materials at the University of Queensland contributed significantly to this work. A portion of the research was also done in Alexandros Shailos' lab at UCLA.

The study was funded by the Focus Center Research Program -- Center on Functional Engineered Nano Architectonics (FENA) at UCLA Engineering; the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA); and the Australian Research Council. The research on topological insulators was pioneered by FENA's Shoucheng Zhang, a professor of physics at Stanford University.

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Physicists Isolate Bound States in Graphene-Superconductor Junctions

Led by University of Illinois physics professor Nadya Mason, the group published its findings in the journalNature Physics.

When a current is applied to a normal conductor, such as metal or graphene, it flows through the material as a stream of single electrons. By contrast, electrons travel in pairs in superconductors. Yet when a normal material is sandwiched between superconductors, the normal metal can carry the supercurrent.

Normal metals can adopt superconducting capacity because the paired electrons from the superconductor are translated to special electron-hole pairs in the normal metal, called Andreev bound states (ABS).

"If you have two superconductors with a normal metal between, you can actually transport the superconductivity across the normal material via these bound states, even though the normal material doesn't have the electron pairing that the superconductors do," Mason said.

ABS are extremely difficult to measure or to observe directly. Researchers can measure conduction and overall magnitude of a current, but have not been able to study individual ABS to understand the fundamental physics contributing to these unique states.

Mason's group developed a method of isolating individual ABS by connecting superconducting probes to tiny, nanoscale flakes of graphene called quantum dots. This confined the ABS to discrete energy levels within the quantum dot, allowing the researchers to measure the superconducting ABS individually and even to manipulate them.

"Before this, it wasn't really possible to understand the fundamentals of what is transporting the current," Mason said."Watching an individual bound state allows you to change one parameter and see how one mode changes. You can really get at a systematic understanding. It also allows you to manipulate ABS to use them for different things that just couldn't be done before."

Superconductor junctions have been proposed for use as superconducting transistors or bits for quantum computers, called qubits. Greater understanding of ABS may enable other applications as well. In addition, it may be possible to use the superconducting graphene quantum dots themselves as solid-state qubits.

"This is a unique case where we found something that we couldn't have discovered without using all of these different elements -- without the graphene, or the superconductor, or the quantum dot, it wouldn't have worked. All of these are really necessary to see this unusual state," Mason said.

The U.S. Department of Energy supported this work, conducted at the Frederick Seitz Materials Research Laboratory at Illinois.

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Ultrafast Quantum Computer Closer: Ten Billion Bits of Entanglement Achieved in Silicon

The researchers used high magnetic fields and low temperatures to produce entanglement between the electron and the nucleus of an atom of phosphorus embedded in a highly purified silicon crystal. The electron and the nucleus behave as a tiny magnet, or 'spin', each of which can represent a bit of quantum information. Suitably controlled, these spins can interact with each other to be coaxed into an entangled state -- the most basic state that cannot be mimicked by a conventional computer.

An international team from the UK, Japan, Canada and Germany, report their achievement in the journalNature.

'The key to generating entanglement was to first align all the spins by using high magnetic fields and low temperatures,' said Stephanie Simmons of Oxford University's Department of Materials, first author of the report. 'Once this has been achieved, the spins can be made to interact with each other using carefully timed microwave and radiofrequency pulses in order to create the entanglement, and then prove that it has been made.'

The work has important implications for integration with existing technology as it uses dopant atoms in silicon, the foundation of the modern computer chip. The procedure was applied in parallel to a vast number of phosphorus atoms.

'Creating 10 billion entangled pairs in silicon with high fidelity is an important step forward for us,' said co-author Dr John Morton of Oxford University's Department of Materials who led the team. 'We now need to deal with the challenge of coupling these pairs together to build a scalable quantum computer in silicon.'

In recent years quantum entanglement has been recognised as a key ingredient in building new technologies that harness quantum properties. Famously described by Einstein as"spooky action at distance" -- when two objects are entangled it is impossible to describe one without also describing the other and the measurement of one object will reveal information about the other object even if they are separated by thousands of miles.

Creating true entanglement involves crossing the barrier between the ordinary uncertainty encountered in our everyday lives and the strange uncertainties of the quantum world. For example, flipping a coin there is a 50% chance that it comes up heads and 50% tails, but we would never imagine the coin could land with both heads and tails facing upwards simultaneously: a quantum object such as the electron spin can do just that.

Dr Morton said: 'At high temperatures there is simply a 50/50 mixture of spins pointing in different directions but, under the right conditions, all the spins can be made to point in two opposing directions at the same time. Achieving this was critical to the generation of spin entanglement.'

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Graphene and 'Spintronics' Combo Looks Promising

Graphene, a two-dimensional crystalline form of carbon, is being touted as a sort of"Holy Grail" of materials. It boasts properties such as a breaking strength 200 times greater than steel and, of great interest to the semiconductor and data storage industries, electric currents that can blaze through it 100 times faster than in silicon.

Spintronic devices are being hotly pursued because they promise to be smaller, more versatile, and much faster than today's electronics."Spin" is a quantum mechanical property that arises when a particle's intrinsic rotational momentum creates a tiny magnetic field. And spin has a direction, either"up" or"down." The direction can encode data in the 0s and 1s of the binary system, with the key here being that spin-based data storage doesn't disappear when the electric current stops.

"There is strong research interest in spintronic devices that process information using electron spins, because these novel devices offer better performance than traditional electronic devices and will likely replace them one day," says Kwok Sum Chan, professor of physics at the City University of Hong Kong"Graphene is an important material for spintronic devices because its electron spin can maintain its direction for a long time and, as a result, information stored isn't easily lost."

It is, however, difficult to generate a spin current in graphene, which would be a key part of carrying information in a graphene spintronic device. Chan and colleagues came up with a method to do just that. It involves using spin splitting in monolayer graphene generated by ferromagnetic proximity effect and adiabatic (a process that is slow compared to the speed of the electrons in the device) quantum pumping. They can control the degree of polarization of the spin current by varying the Fermi energy (the level in the distribution of electron energies in a solid at which a quantum state is equally likely to be occupied or empty), which they say is very important for meeting various application requirements.

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Unexpected Magnetic Order Among Titanium Atoms Discovered

The results, published inNature Communications, have special significance for the design of future electronic devices for computations and telecommunications, according to co-author Satoshi Okamoto of ORNL's Materials Science and Technology Division. The work was performed at Universidad Complutense de Madrid, synchrotron radiation facilities in France and Japan, University of Bristol and University of Warwick.

"What the team found was an unexpected magnetic order among the titanium atoms at an interface between strontium titanate and lanthanum manganite, which are both insulators in bulk," Okamoto said.

With today's nano-fabrication tools, scientists can develop artificial materials with controlled precision -- almost atom by atom -- of alternating very thin crystalline layers of different materials. The properties of these materials are determined by the structure of interfaces of the different materials and how atoms interact through the interfaces.

Such an interface has traditionally been considered a source of disorder, but in the case of materials such as complex oxides used for this study, the result was something that does not exist naturally in any other material. In order to clarify the electronic properties of such interfaces, the research team made detailed synchrotron X-ray measurements.

"The result was even more surprising as we observed a new type of magnetism in titanium atoms, which are non-magnetic in bulk strontium titanate," Okamoto said.

Furthermore, the researchers were able to manipulate the structure of spin, or magnetism, at atomic scale. The theoretical work by Okamoto provided the key to understand the origin of this novel form of interfacial magnetism and is of particular importance for the development of new spintronic devices such as tunneling magneto-resistance junction, which can be used as a head of a hard-disc drive.

While today's electronic devices are based on the transfer of electrical charge between two materials, a potential alternative, spintronic devices, would also use the magnetic moment, or spin, of electrons in addition to their charge and would therefore be more efficient for sending or storing information as an electric signal.

The research, published Sept. 21, was led by Jacobo Santamaria of Universidad Complutense de Madrid. Funding was provided by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation. Work at ORNL was supported by DOE's Office of Basic Energy Sciences.

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Trapping Charged Particles With Laser Light

Dr. Tobias Schätz, leader of the Emmy-Noether-Research Group Quantum Simulations at the Max Planck Institute of Quantum Optics, and his team have now demonstrated the possibility of combining both methods as well as both kinds of particles: they succeeded to store an ion in an optical trap for the first time. Their experiment opens new perspectives, for example for using controllable quantum systems in the simulation of condensed matter properties. At the same time completely new experimental possibilities may arise in the field of ultracold chemistry.

Experimental quantum simulations are based on the principle of modeling a complex many-body system (e.g. a metallic solid state), whose quantum properties are neither understood nor controllable, by yet another system which allows the study of analogue properties under precisely defined conditions. These model systems can be realized in different ways. Most promising are systems based on ions sitting in radiofrequency traps, and systems made of neutral atoms stored in light fields. A special case of the latter is an optical lattice which is created by overlapping laser waves in a way that a periodic pattern of bright and dark areas emerges. For about three decades these"crystals of light" have shown to be a very useful tool for manipulating and controlling ultracold neutral atoms.

The decision to exploit which kind of particles strongly depends on the question under investigation. One of the topics the group of Dr. Schätz is very interested in is quantum properties of magnetic matter. Magnetism of a solid state can occur when the individual elemental atoms carry an angular momentum, a so-call spin. Depending on external conditions the interaction of each two spins makes them to align either parallel or antiparallel, thus eventually leading to ferromagnetic or antiferromagnetic (in the latter for uneven spin numbers even"frustrated") states. The investigation of the quantum dynamics of these states may make a contribution to a better understanding of high-temperature superconductivity. For the analogue simulation of spin-spin-interaction and its consequences ions are their preferred candidates because the Coulomb-force between neighbouring ions is much stronger than the interaction of neighbouring atoms in an optical lattice. Experimental quantum simulations with ions therefore could take a much shorter time than in the case of atoms whereby the influence of external fields would get largely reduced.

Because of their electric charge ions are also most easily to influence by external electromagnetic fields. Hence physicists have used the method of trapping ions with alternating radiofrequency fields by now for more than sixty years. Meanwhile storage times of up to several months are achieved. However, these systems suffer from a severe drawback: it is very difficult to scale them to larger architectures, which limits the possibilities of performing quantum simulations with sufficiently many ions. So, what is the reason that up to now optical lattices have not been used as an alternative for storing ions?

"Optical fields are disfavoured because they don't allow for potential wells nearly as deep as they are guaranteed by radiofrequency fields," Dr. Schätz explains."At the same time ions react in a very sensitive way to external stray fields. This has caused the widely believed prejudice that optical potentials are too shallow and therefore unable to trap ions. But, as a matter of fact, we were able to experimentally demonstrate that ions can indeed be trapped by the interaction with light.

The scientists start their experiment with cooling a single magnesium ion down to a few thousandths of a degree above absolute zero temperature. In the next step external stray fields are compensated for by appropriate"counter fields." Then a strongly collimated laser beam is turned on while the radiofrequency field gets switched off. According to a series of measurements the ion was kept in place for several milliseconds. This corresponds to a couple of hundred oscillations of the ion in the potential well, despite its relatively shallow shape.

Tobias Schätz does not seem to be awfully surprised by this change of paradigm."In principle, both traps, the radio frequency as well as the optical, work the same way: they capture the particle by a fast changing electromagnetic field." At present the lifetime of the ion in the optical trap is only limited by heating which is caused by scattering light of the optical field. It could be largely improved with state-of-the art techniques.

Once it was possible to extend the principle of optical trapping as demonstrated in this experimental approach to a large number of ions in an optical lattice a completely new class of experiments could be carried out. Besides simulating complex spin-systems, hybrid quantum systems could be developed which combine ions and atoms in a common optical lattice with the quantum particles"sharing" the excess charges.

There are also intriguing possibilities for investigating chemical reactions at extremely low temperatures. If, for example, a single ion was embedded in a cold atomic quantum gas (a so-called Bose-Einstein condensate) in a common optical trap, the particles would -- due to their very low kinetic energy -- spend so much time together, that novel chemical reactions caused by quantum mechanical tunneling might evolve. Hence this experiment is both the beginning of a new generation of quantum simulations and of a new era of ultracold chemistry.

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