Spintronics is an emerging field of basic and applied research in physics and engineering where the “neglected” magnetic degree of freedom of an electron, its spin, is envisaged to be exploited for classical and quantum information processing.
While metallic spintronics has already delivered functional devices (GMR read heads in large capacity hard disk drives), and magnetic RAM of insulator Spintronics (magnetic tunnel junctions) is expected to hit the market soon, current basic physics research is mostly focused on Semiconductor Spintronics.
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Although creating an inhomogeneous spin distribution requires no energy penalty (unlike charge distributions in conventional electronics), spin is not conserved, whereas charge is. Thus, efforts in semiconductor spintronic research are focused on basic problems, such as coherent manipulation of electron spin at a given location, transporting spins between different locations within a conventional semiconductor environment, all-electrical spin control via spin-orbit interactions, diluted magnetic semiconductors, and fixed or mobile spin qubits for quantum computing.
Typical Spintronics Challenges
- How to polarize a system, just a single electron or an ensemble (induce magnetization in a material).
- How to keep it in a desired spin configuration longer than the time required by the device to make use of the information carried by this configuration.
- How to transport the information carried by these spin configurations across a device, and, finally, accurately read it.
Nowadays, organic spintronics is one of the most promising research fields where organic materials are used in the control of spin-polarized signals. Combining “spintronics” and “organic electronics” is an exciting means to build future nano-electronic devices.
One of the crucial issues in this field is the spin injection efficiency at the ferromagnetic-organic interface. Understanding the phenomenon induced at the interface will lead to the possibility of tailoring the electronic and magnetic structure of such interfaces and help to overcome the significant spin loss observed in spintronic devices. Our theoretical works are based on ab initio methods, where we model different ferromagnetic-organic interfaces, involving aromatic molecules, in order to reproduce the local spin polarization present at the interface.
Our first-principles study demonstrates that the spin polarization can selectively be injected from the ferromagnetic surface to the aromatic molecules. These molecules are playing an important role in the local control of the spin polarization inversion close to the Fermi level. This behavior will be exploited to increase the efficiency of future molecular spintronic devices by making a good selection of organic semiconductors.
Reference: https://aminmaleki2.wordpress.com/spintronics/
