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Nature 442, 359-360 (27 July 2006) | doi:10.1038/442359a; Published online 26 July 2006

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Semiconductor physics: Magnetic manipulations

Nitin Samarth1

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A deft technique allows magnetic atoms to be placed one by one in a semiconductor crystal. It's a further step towards an ambitious goal: a computer chip that might simultaneously store and manipulate data.

On page 436 of this issue, Yazdani and colleagues (Kitchen et al.)1 show how a scanning tunnelling microscope can be used to assemble, atom by atom, a magnetic semiconductor. The result is an atomic-scale laboratory that allows an unprecedentedly clear picture of the electronic energies and magnetic interactions in the material concerned — manganese-doped gallium arsenide (refs 2, 3 and references therein).

  1. Nitin Samarth is in the Department of Physics, Penn State University, 104 Davey Laboratory, University Park, Pennsylvania 16802-6300, USA.
    Email: nsamarth@psu.edu

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