New device controls electron spin at room temperature

October 5th, 2009 WASHINGTON - Researchers of Eindhoven University of Technology and the Radboud University Nijmegen in The Netherlands have shown that ordinary graphite is a permanent magnet at room temperature because it can mimic iron's magnetism. Graphite is a well-known lubricant and forms the basis for pencils.

September 28th, 2009 WASHINGTON - Physicists at UC (University of California) San Diego have successfully created speedy integrated circuits with particles called "excitons" that operate at commercially cold temperatures, bringing the possibility of a new type of extremely fast computer based on excitons closer to reality. Their discovery follows the team's demonstration last summer of an integrated circuit-an assembly of transistors that is the building block for all electronic devices-capable of working at 1.5 degrees Kelvin above absolute zero.

August 12th, 2009 WASHINGTON - Researchers at the University of Gothenburg, Sweden, have developed a laser technique that, in combination with standard techniques, would help to find supernovas. To find a supernova, the new technique would have to search for one single atom of a certain isotope of hafnium on Earth, which would prove that a supernova once exploded near our solar system.

July 27th, 2009 WASHINGTON - Scientists from the University of California Riverside (UCR) have manipulated ripples in graphene, which would enable the development of strain-based graphene electronics. Graphene is nature's thinnest elastic material and displays exceptional mechanical and electronic properties.

July 23rd, 2009 WASHINGTON - Its music, not electromechanical valves, that controls a novel lab-on-a-chip device designed at the University of Michigan (UM). The new system could significantly simplify the process of conducting experiments in microfluidic devices.

June 1st, 2009 WASHINGTON - Ramamoorthy Ramesh, a scientist of Indian origin, along with his colleagues at Berkeley Lab's Materials Sciences Division in the US, successfully demonstrated that electric fields can be used as ON/OFF switches in doped multiferroic films. Multiferroics are materials in which unique combinations of electric and magnetic properties can simultaneously coexist.

May 25th, 2009 WASHINGTON - Scientists have come up with a new computer memory device that can store thousands of times more data than conventional silicon chips and that too for more than one billion years. Packing more digital images, music, and other data onto silicon chips in USB drives and smart phones is like squeezing more strawberries into the same size supermarket carton.

April 30th, 2009 WASHINGTON - Physicists at the U.S. Department of Energy's Ames Laboratory have experimentally demonstrated that the superconductivity mechanism in the recently discovered iron-arsenide superconductors is unique compared to all other known classes of superconductors.

April 16th, 2009 WASHINGTON - In the first demonstration of its kind, researchers at the University of British Columbia have controlled the spin of electrons using a ballistic technique. For controlling the spin of electrons, the team bounced electrons through a microscopic channel of precisely constructed, two-dimensional layer of semiconductor.

April 1st, 2009 WASHINGTON - Researchers working with the world's most powerful electron microscope have filmed carbon atoms in live motion for the first time, as the atoms repositioned themselves around the edge of a hole punched into a graphene sheet. Viewers of the 'movie' that promises to become a blockbuster - at least over the Internet - observed chemical bonds breaking and forming as the suddenly volatile atoms are driven to find a stable configuration.

March 20th, 2009 WASHINGTON - Scientists at the University of Illinois have moved a step closer to realising higher speed electronics and higher performance electrical and optical integrated circuits, for they have successfully created a microwave signal mixer made from a tunnel-junction transistor laser. The researchers have revealed that their mixing device accepts two electrical inputs, and produces an optical signal that was measured at frequencies of up to 22.7 gigahertz.

March 19th, 2009 WASHINGTON - Scientists have developed a new technique for growing slimmer copper nanorods, a breakthrough that can pave the way for advanced integrated 3-D chip technology. The researchers have found a new method to grow slimmer copper nanorods, which can be used as a low-temperature bonding agent for holding together the layers of next-generation 3-D integrated computer chips.

March 12th, 2009 WASHINGTON - An International team of physicists has been able to prove the existence of a "spin battery", a battery that is "charged" by applying a large magnetic field to nano-magnets in a device called a magnetic tunnel junction (MTJ). Developed by researchers at the University of Miami and at the Universities of Tokyo and Tohoku, in Japan, the new technology is a step towards the creation of computer hard drives with no moving parts, which would be much faster, less expensive and use less energy than current ones.

February 1st, 2009 WASHINGTON - Stanford researchers have reclaimed bragging rights for creating the world's tiniest writing, in sub-atomic letters more than a billion times smaller than a metre - a distinction the university first gained in 1985 and lost in 1990. How small is the writing? The letters in the words are assembled from subatomic sized bits as small as 0.3 nanometers, or roughly one third of a billionth of a metre.

January 19th, 2009 WASHINGTON - A powerful new tool can image single molecules in a cell, with much greater clarity and speed, compared to existing methods. The new tool, dubbed liquid scanning transmission electron microscope or liquid STEM, uses a micro-fluidic device with electron transparent windows to enable the imaging of cells in liquid.