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01/12/2008
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Researchers at the US National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), in assocation with Korea University and the University of Notre Dame, have confirmed that thin magnetic layers of semiconductor material can exhibit antiferromagnetic coupling, where one layer aligns its magnetic pole spontaneously in the opposite direction to the next magnetic layer.
Although antiferromagnetic coupling in metals was the basis of the 2007 Nobel Prize in Physics, it has only recently become conceivable for semiconductor materials. The researchers believe this development could lead to semiconductors which can process and store data.
Theorists had predicted that antiferromagnetic coupling could be engineered in thin films of gallium arsenide (GaAs) – with manganese taking the place of some of the gallium atoms – separated by thin layers of a nonmagnetic material. By switching the magnetisation of one of the GaAs layers back and forth, ‘spintronic’ logic circuits could be created.
The NIST team studied these multilayer stacks using polarised neutron reflectometry and found that, at temperatures of around 30K and with small magnetic fields, the data confirmed ‘unambiguously’ the existence of an antiparallel magnetic alignment of neighbouring layers.
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Author
Graham Pitcher
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