Lecture Time: 10:00 on 19th April, 2018

Lecture Room: C501 of Science and Innovation Building

Lecture Title:Putting the Spin in in Electronics 

Bruce D. McCombe

University at Buffalo, the State University of New York

Abstract

For almost two decades spin effects in semiconductors have received a great deal of attention as part of a worldwide effort to develop Spintronics technology.  Spintronics focuses on controlling the intrinsic spin (rather than the charge) of carriers in semiconductors to produce new/novel functionalities that yield faster and lower power circuits. Aligning, injecting, manipulating and detecting spins form the framework for this field, and central to much of this work is the spin-orbit interaction in semiconductors and exploiting it to manipulate spins with electric fields.  Narrow gap materials and structures typically have large SO interaction, and those lacking inversion symmetry in the crystal structure, or for which asymmetries can be introduced and controlled, i.e. structural inversion asymmetry or the Rashba effect, are of special interest.

I will review briefly some history of the field and discuss the basic ideas and physics. I will then focus on some examples of work at UB, including the III-Mn-V dilute magnetic semiconductor alloys and their structure and magnetic properties, and more recent work on aligning, injecting and optically detecting spin polarized electrons in GaAs- and InAs-based heterostructures.   I will conclude by discussing some future directions of this research and mention other, more recent, "onics" developments.