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The growing demand for storage, due to big data applications, cannot be met by hard disk drives. Domain wall (DW) memory devices such as racetrack memory offer an alternative route to achieve high capacity storage. In DW memory, control of domain wall positions and their motion using spin-transfer torque are important challenges. In this paper, we demonstrate controlled domain wall motion using spin-transfer torque in staggered magnetic nanowires. The devices, fabricated using electron-beam lithography, were tested using a magneto-optical Kerr microscopy and electrical transport measurements. The depinning current, pinning potential and thermal stability were found to depend on the device dimensions of the staggering nanowires. Thus, the proposed staggering configuration helps to fine-tune the properties of domain wall devices for memory applications.

The large electronic polarization in III-V nitrides allow for novel physics not possible in other semiconductor families. In this work, interband Zener tunneling in wide-bandgap GaN heterojunctions is demonstrated by using polarization-induced electric fields. The resulting tunnel diodes are more conductive under reverse bias, which has applications for zero-bias rectification and mm-wave imaging. Since interband tunneling is traditionally prohibitive in wide-bandgap semiconductors, these polarization-induced structures and their variants can enable a number of devices such as multijunction solar cells that can operate under elevated temperatures and high fields., Comment: 4 pages, 5 Figures

Part I describes an intelligent acoustic emission locator, while Part II discusses blind source separation, time delay estimation and location of two continuous acoustic emission sources. Acoustic emission (AE) analysis is used for characterization and location of developing defects in materials. AE sources often generate a mixture of various statistically independent signals. A difficult problem of AE analysis is separation and characterization of signal components when the signals from various sources and the mode of mixing are unknown. Recently, blind source separation (BSS) by independent component analysis (ICA) has been used to solve these problems. The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate the applicability of ICA to locate two independent simultaneously active acoustic emission sources on an aluminum band specimen. The method is promising for non-destructive testing of aircraft frame structures by acoustic emission analysis., Comment: 5 pages, 7 eps figures, uses IEEEtran.cls