Electronics takes on a new spin
Exotic materials called topological insulators, discovered just a few years ago, have yielded some of their secrets to a team of MIT researchers. For the first time, the team showed that light can be...
View ArticleA one-way street for spinning atoms
Elementary particles have a property called “spin” that can be thought of as rotation around their axes. In work reported this week in the journal Physical Review Letters, MIT physicists have imposed a...
View ArticleStoring data in individual molecules
Moore’s law — the well-known doubling of computer chips’ computational power every 18 months or so — has been paced by a similarly steady increase in the storage capacity of disk drives. In 1980, a...
View ArticleTeam visualizes complex electronic state
A material called sodium manganese dioxide has shown promise for use in electrodes in rechargeable batteries. Now a team of researchers has produced the first detailed visualization — down to the level...
View ArticleSpin designers
Computers are basically machines that process information in the form of electronic zeros and ones. But two MIT professors of materials science and engineering are trying to change that.Caroline Ross...
View ArticleUnusual magnetic behavior observed at a material interface
An exotic kind of magnetic behavior, driven by the mere proximity of two materials, has been analyzed by a team of researchers at MIT and elsewhere using a technique called spin-polarized neutron...
View ArticleHow to make large 2-D sheets
Sheets of graphene and other materials that are virtually two-dimensional hold great promise for electronic, optical, and other high-tech applications. But the biggest limitation in unleashing this...
View ArticleResearch highlight: Jagadeesh Moodera
MIT Physics Department Senior Research Scientist Jagadeesh S. Moodera was one of the pioneers in the field of spin-polarized magnetic tunnel junctions, which led to a thousand-fold increase in hard...
View ArticleAchieving zero resistance in energy flow
Laptop computer users operating their devices on their laps will be familiar with the heat they generate, which comes from electrical resistance converting waste energy to heat. Scientists dream of...
View ArticleResearchers find unexpected magnetic effect
A new and unexpected magnetic effect has taken researchers by surprise, and could open up a new pathway to advanced electronic devices and even robust quantum computer architecture. The finding is...
View ArticleMixing topology and spin
In the pursuit of material platforms for the next generation of electronics, scientists are studying new compounds such as topological insulators (TIs), which support protected electron states on the...
View ArticleBooting up spin-based device studies
MIT Materials Processing Center (MPC)-Center for Materials Science and Engineering (CMSE) Summer Scholar Grant Smith is working in the lab of MIT assistant professor of electrical engineering and...
View ArticleToward “valleytronic” devices for data storage or computer logic systems
Faster, more efficient data storage and computer logic systems could be on the horizon thanks to a new way of tuning electronic energy levels in two-dimensional films of crystal, discovered by...
View ArticleGeoffrey Beach: Drawn to explore magnetism
Geoffrey Beach has been tinkering and building things most of his life, including some 50 model rockets that he built and launched while in high school in Oklahoma. But it wasn’t until his...
View ArticleFast-moving magnetic particles could enable new form of data storage
New research has shown that an exotic kind of magnetic behavior discovered just a few years ago holds great promise as a way of storing data — one that could overcome fundamental limits that might...
View ArticleDeveloping new magnetic device materials
Assistant professor of electrical engineering Luqiao Liu is developing new magnetic materials, known as antiferromagnets, that can be operated at room temperature by reversing their electron spin and...
View ArticleStudy opens route to ultra-low-power microchips
A new approach to controlling magnetism in a microchip could open the doors to memory, computing, and sensing devices that consume drastically less power than existing versions. The approach could also...
View ArticleControllable fast, tiny magnetic bits
For many modern technical applications, such as superconducting wires for magnetic resonance imaging, engineers want as much as possible to get rid of electrical resistance and its accompanying...
View ArticleApproaching the magnetic singularity
In many materials, electrical resistance and voltage change in the presence of a magnetic field, usually varying smoothly as the magnetic field rotates. This simple magnetic response underlies many...
View ArticleToward more efficient computing, with magnetic waves
MIT researchers have devised a novel circuit design that enables precise control of computing with magnetic waves — with no electricity needed. The advance takes a step toward practical magnetic-based...
View ArticleMIT researchers realize “ideal” kagome metal electronic structure
Since 2016, a team of MIT researchers consisting of graduate students Linda Ye and Min Gu Kang, associate professor of physics Joseph G. Checkelsky, and Class of 1947 Career Development Assistant...
View ArticleFinding the right quantum materials
The Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation has awarded MIT Associate Professor of Physics Joseph G. Checkelsky a $1.7 million Emergent Phenomena in Quantum Systems (EPiQS) Initiative grant to pursue his...
View ArticleExploring new paths to future quantum electronics
When ultrathin layered materials are coupled with other quantum materials having different properties, the resulting interface could produce a new quantum phenomenon — and new properties of the hybrid...
View ArticleResearchers find a new way to control magnets
Most of the magnets we encounter daily are made of “ferromagnetic” materials. The north-south magnetic axes of most atoms in these materials are lined up in the same direction, so their collective...
View ArticleGene Dresselhaus, influential research scientist in solid-state physics, dies...
Gene Dresselhaus, a longtime research physicist at MIT’s Lincoln Laboratory and later the Francis Bitter Magnet Laboratory at MIT (now part of the MIT Plasma Science and Fusion Center), died peacefully...
View ArticlePutting a new spin on computer hardware
Luqiao Liu was the kind of kid who would rather take his toys apart to see how they worked than play with them the way they were intended.Curiosity has been a driving force throughout his life, and it...
View ArticlePropelling atomically layered magnets toward green computers
Globally, computation is booming at an unprecedented rate, fueled by the boons of artificial intelligence. With this, the staggering energy demand of the world’s computing infrastructure has become a...
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