Search

The article informs that a three-year "spintronics" study will be funded by Great Britain Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council and the National Science Foundation of China. The study aims to develop ultra small silicon structures for spintronic semiconductors. The study will be carried out by the London Centre for Nanotechnology at the University College London, the Institute of Microelectronics at Peking University and the University of Surrey's Advanced Technology Institute.

The article reports that the fundamental research in the fields including materials design, spintronics, nanoscale engineering, and superconductivity in Great Britain will receive a boost in January 2006 when the Diamond Synchrotron goes online. The facility being built on the Harwell/Chilton site in Oxfordshire, will eventually feature up to 40 different experimental set-ups--beamlines, around a central electron storage ring with a circumference of 560m. The intense, very high quality light that emerges at a tangent to the circular path of the electrons will provide powerful imaging and analysis capabilities. They are fired in at a grazing incidence of less than one degree and the scattering pattern is analyzed to deduce the structure. The intention is to nurture a community of start-up companies and business incubators on the site.

The article reports that the researchers of Great Britain have produced digital spintronic circuits to represent ones and zeros. Zeros are represented by the direction of magnetisation along any particular length of wire. Gates are formed at the junction of wires, where angle of meeting and wire width is critical to the function. A NOT gate consists of a 500 by 225-nm dead end fed by a 500 by 100-nm wire and feeding a 500 by 100-nm wire.