Grant: Discovery Grants Program - Individual

A new form of electronics called spintronics exploits a quantum mechanical property of the electron called spin. Electron spin is analogous to a spinning top, which can rotate either clockwise or counterclockwise. Likewise, an electron's spin can either point up or down. The idea of spintronics is to use the up and down electrons as two binary states for information storage. The virtue of using electron spins to store information is that in ferromagnetic materials no power is required to maintain the direction of the spins inside the material. This is in contrast to conventional electronics, which stores information by accumulating charge on transistors that quickly leaks away if the power is turned off. If a computer's random access memory were made of spintronic components, there would be no need to reboot the computer after a power failure because the electron spins would retain all the information. Since no power is required to keep the information in memory, spintronic devices would consume much less power, which is particularly important for portable electronic devices. Current spintronic devices can be found in the read head of every hard drive that is manufactured today. However, to fully exploit the potential of spintronics, the new technology will have to be incorporated into the microchip. One approach to integrating spintronic materials with semiconductors is to make semiconductors ferromagnetic by doping them with magnetic impurities. Ferromagnetism has been discovered in Mn doped GaAs and Ge. Unfortunately, they are magnetic only at temperatures far below room temperature. The goal of the work is to better understand the physics behind ferromagnetic semiconductors in order to assist in finding ways of increasing their working temperature. This research will investigate novel spintronic materials that are compatible with Si technology by incorporating magnetic elements into Si and Ge structures. The materials will be used to study how spins cross the interfaces in heterostructures.