Si and Ge based spintronic materials

一种名为自旋电子学的新形式的电子学利用了被称为自旋的电子的量子力学性质。电子自旋类似于旋转的顶部，它可以顺时针或逆时针旋转。同样，电子的自旋可以向上或向下指向。自旋电子学的想法是将上下电子作为两个二进制状态来存储信息。使用电子自旋存储信息的优点是，在铁磁材料中，不需要电力来保持材料内部自旋的方向。这与传统电子学不同，它通过在晶体管上积累电荷来存储信息，一旦电源关闭，这些电荷就会迅速泄漏。如果计算机的随机存取存储器是由自旋电子组件组成的，那么在电源故障后就不需要重新启动计算机，因为电子自旋将保留所有信息。*由于不需要电源来将信息保存在存储器中，自旋电子设备消耗的电力要少得多，这对便携式电子设备特别重要。目前制造的每个硬盘驱动器的读取头中都可以找到自旋电子设备。然而，要充分利用自旋电子设备的潜力，这项新技术将不得不被整合到微芯片中。将自旋电子材料与半导体相结合的一种方法是通过在半导体中掺杂磁性杂质来使其具有铁磁性。在掺锰的GaAs和Ge中已经发现了铁磁性。不幸的是，它们只有在远低于室温的温度下才具有磁性。这项工作的目标是更好地了解铁磁性半导体背后的物理原理，以帮助寻找提高其工作温度的方法。这项研究将通过在硅和锗结构中加入磁性元素来研究与硅技术兼容的新型自旋电子材料。这些材料将被用于研究自旋如何穿过异质结构中的界面。

A new form of electronics called spintronics exploits a quantum mechanical property of the electron called spin.  Electron spin is analogous to a spinning top, which can rotate either clockwise or counterclockwise.  Likewise, an electron's spin can either point up or down.  The idea of spintronics is to use the up and down electrons as two binary states for information storage.  The virtue of using electron spins to store information is that in ferromagnetic materials no power is required to maintain the direction of the spins inside the material.  This is in contrast to conventional electronics, which stores information by accumulating charge on transistors that quickly leaks away if the power is turned off.  If a computer's random access memory were made of spintronic components, there would be no need to reboot the computer after a power failure because the electron spins would retain all the information.  Since no power is required to keep the information in memory, spintronic devices would consume much less power, which is particularly important for portable electronic devices.Current spintronic devices can be found in the read head of every hard drive that is manufactured today.  However, to fully exploit the potential of spintronics, the new technology will have to be incorporated into the microchip.  One approach to integrating spintronic materials with semiconductors is to make semiconductors ferromagnetic by doping them with magnetic impurities.  Ferromagnetism has been discovered in Mn doped GaAs and Ge.  Unfortunately, they are magnetic only at temperatures far below room temperature.  The goal of the work is to better understand the physics behind ferromagnetic semiconductors in order to assist in finding ways of increasing their working temperature.  This research will investigate novel spintronic materials that are compatible with Si technology by incorporating magnetic elements into Si and Ge structures.  The materials will be used to study how spins cross the interfaces in heterostructures.