U. study promises faster electronics
By Greg Lavine
The Salt Lake Tribune
University
of Utah scientists hope to put a new spin on electronic goods, which could
lead to faster computers that require no boot-up time.
A study in today's edition of the science journal Nature examines
more efficient ways to control the flow of electrical current through semiconductors,
a key computer part. While most semiconductors are made from inorganic material,
such as silicon, U. researchers created the parts from organic material.
U. physicists Z. Valy Vardeny and Jing Shi combined advances from
the young fields of organic semiconductors and spin electronics. Also known
as spintronics, this emerging field takes advantage of special electron properties
to store and transmit information.
Vardeny said other researchers have tried to merge spintronics and
inorganic semiconductors with little success.
"Regular semiconductors do not work for spintronics," he explained.
The U. team tried a different route, applying spintronics to organic semiconductors.
"It wasn't at all clear that this would work," Shi said.
Information storage in today's computers relies on the presence
or absence of an electron, a negatively charged particle found in an atom,
within a semiconductor. A 0 or a 1 -- depending on whether an electron
is present or not -- is the basic unit used to store data using computer
binary code.
Spintronics takes advantage of other properties of electrons to
create the 0s and 1s of binary code. Spintronics deals with the magnetism
of electrons. If each electron had a bar magnet, acting like a compass needle,
it would point up or down to indicate the spin of the particle.
When electrons move through nonmagnetic materials, half of them
normally have "up" spins and half have "down" spins, essentially canceling
each other out. Using magnets to manipulate electrons so they all spin the
same way offers a new way to store information through binary code.
U. researchers are standing at the early phases of combining spintronics with organic semiconductors.
"The work they've done is truly pioneering," said Ray Baughman,
a physicist at the University of Texas, Dallas, who was not involved in the
study.
Before this technology can find its way to home electronics store
shelves, more research is needed. Spintronics already is used in magnetic
recording technology, though not in computer RAM, or random access memory.
Shi and Vardeny were part of the team to build the first "organic
spin valves," a process detailed in the current study. These valves control
the flow of electrical current through semiconductors.
The Department of Energy, the Department of Defense's Defense
Advanced Research Projects Agency and the American Chemical Society's Petroleum
Research Fund provided funding for the U. study. Postdoctoral researchers
Zuhong Xiong and Di Wu were also involved in the work.
glavine@sltrib.com
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