Fred Mancoff (top) and Shehzaad Kaka.

Fireflies flashing in unison...pedestrians marching over bridges and falling in step with each other... Nature has a way of getting things in synch. So it should come as no surprise that two separate groups — one academic, one industrial — simultaneously pursued such effects in tiny devices (see pages 389 and 393).

The starting point for both groups was an earlier finding that nanosized magnetic oscillators can generate microwaves. By combining multiple devices, the teams hoped to generate sizeable amounts of microwave power. To test out this idea, they set about linking two devices. This, they hope, will serve as the first step towards building a simple wireless circuit, which could pave the way to faster computation.

Selecting and assembling the building blocks for their devices posed difficult problems for both groups. The fabrication process was “fairly complicated”, says Shehzaad Kaka, first author on the paper from the public effort, based at the US National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) laboratory in Boulder, Colorado. Fred Mancoff, first author with the commercial group at Freescale Semiconductor in Chandler, Arizona, agrees.

The devices are made up of several layers of thin-film materials, and patterning the tiny magnetic oscillators meant using electron beam lithography to resolve the features between neighbouring oscillators. They had to find ways to monitor how the devices worked, both as individuals and when the two were hooked up together. “At first, we weren't really set up for measuring these high-frequency signals,” Mancoff says.

As the two groups moved from studying individual oscillators to two coupled devices, they took slightly different approaches. For each set of measurements, the NIST group kept its two oscillators in the same position. The Freescale researchers focused instead on what happened as they changed the distance between the two devices.

Despite the different approaches, both groups quickly saw the same thing: at some point, the electrical output signal from each of the two devices began oscillating at the same frequency. “It was something we were hoping to get,” says Kaka.

Both teams were surprised at how quickly they got a result. “From the first step, there was a fairly strong effect going on as a result of the spacing,” Mancoff says. “I knew that there was probably some interesting physics going on.”

Each of the two groups was aware that the other was doing similar research — not surprising as the two first authors had shared an office at NIST when Kaka was a PhD student and Mancoff was a postdoc. So, having validated their work with more experiments, they both scrambled to submit a paper. “Once we found that Freescale was also intending to publish, that definitely motivated us to finish up, write it up and send it in for publication,” says Kaka.

Although neither group demonstrated that the devices in tandem can generate sizeable amounts of power, both groups aim to combine more devices. Thanks to the potential applications of the devices, the groups expect to see even more competition in this field. And they might even see more developments that seem to happen in synch.