Semiconductor Spintronics

Session D: Semiconductor Spintronics

Lecture Notes on Semiconductor Spintronics

These informal lecture notes describe the progress in semiconductor spintronics in a historic perspective as well as in a comparison to achievements of spintronics of ferromagnetic metals. After outlining motivations behind spintronic research, selected results of investigations on three groups of materials are presented. These include non-magnetic semiconductors, hybrid structures involving se...

Demonstration of CoFeB-MgO magnetic tunnel junctions with high thermal stability and low power consumption -Advancement towards high density spintronics based memories-

The research group of Professor Hideo Ohno of the Center for Spintronics Integrated Systems, the Research Institute of Electrical Communication, and the WPI Advanced Institute for Materials Research, together with ULVAC, successfully fabricated magnetic tunnel junctions with a diameter reduced to 11 nm. They demonstrated that high thermal stability and low power consumption can be simultaneousl...

Spin Memristive Systems: Spin Memory Effects in Semiconductor Spintronics

Recently, in addition to the well-known resistor, capacitor, and inductor, a fourth passive circuit element, named memristor, has been identified following theoretical predictions. The model example used in such case consisted in a nanoscale system with coupled ionic and electronic transport. Here, we discuss a system whose memristive behavior is based entirely on the electron-spin degree of fr...

Selected Papers

In semiconductor spintronics, electron spin rather than charge is the key property. This paper describes several spin-related devices using spin-orbit interaction. We have experimentally confirmed that the spin-orbit interaction in a semiconductor two-dimensional electron gas channel can be controlled by a gate voltage. This is the first step towards the creation of functional spin devices. The...