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Spintronics

Getting current pulses under control

Nature Nanotechnology volume 8, pages 232–233 (2013)Cite this article

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Ultrafast spin currents in iron-based heterostructures generate terahertz radiation bursts whose frequency can be tailored through structural engineering.

Electronic devices based on the transport of spins could offer a number of significant advantages over those used at present, which are based on the transport of charge, including low power switching and modulation at terahertz speeds1,2. However, whereas spin-based technologies such as magnetic recording and magnetic resonance imaging are now relatively mature, spin transport is still in its infancy. An important step in the development of these spintronic devices is the generation and control of spin currents at frequencies up to the terahertz range. Writing in Nature Nanotechnology, Tobias Kampfrath of the Fritz Haber Institute in Berlin and colleagues in Germany and Sweden have now shown that femtosecond spin-current pulses, created in a stack of thin films, can be tuned by engineering the heterostructure3.

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Figure 1: Schematic of the approach used by Kampfrath and colleagues3 to generate and detect ultrashort spin-current bursts.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Richard Averitt is at the Department of Physics, Boston University, 590 Commonwealth Avenue, Boston, Massachusetts 02215, USA,

    Richard D. Averitt

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  1. Richard D. Averitt
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Correspondence to Richard D. Averitt.

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Averitt, R. Getting current pulses under control. Nature Nanotech 8, 232–233 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1038/nnano.2013.51

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