Can conventional semiconductors learn new tricks?
“For information processing and advanced logic operations, it would be particularly desirable to integrate seamlessly magnetic materials with silicon,” said Zutic, Ph.D., assistant professor of physics in the UB College of Arts and Sciences. “Rather than displace all that we’ve learned about silicon through the decades, my work tries to build on it.” Zutic’s proposal for spin injection and detection in silicon was published in July in Physical Review Letters with collaborators Jaroslav Fabian of the University of Regensburg and Steven Erwin at the Naval Research Laboratory. Now, the October issue of Nature Materials is publishing Zutic’s “News & Views” article on related experimental efforts to grow junctions of ferromagnetic metals and silicon. Modern information technology uses the charge of electrons to process information and the spin of electrons to store data. While charge-based electronics is centered around semiconductor silicon chips, magnetic data storage (as in computer hard
