Researchers at Frankfurt's Goethe University have grown crystals that could one day be used in new, particularly efficient computer chips.
These are materials in which information is no longer transmitted by flowing electrons, but by their angular momentum.
This approach, called spintronics, could be used to build more powerful and energy-saving computers.
Sasha Zoske
Sheet maker in the Rhein-Main-Zeitung.
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"You can imagine the electron spins as tiny magnetic needles that are attached to the atoms of a crystal lattice and that communicate with each other," says Cornelius Krellner, Professor of Experimental Physics at the University of Frankfurt.
So far, spintronics experiments have used ferromagnetic materials whose atomic magnetic needles tend to point in one direction.
However, antiferromagnets, in which neighboring spins are oriented in the opposite direction, are even more suitable.
Krellner's team made such antiferromagnets from rare earths.
These elements include praseodymium, neodymium and holmium.
The Frankfurt researchers used an innovative process to produce the crystals and examined their properties together with colleagues from Berlin and Switzerland.
However, it will probably be years before antiferromagnets are actually used in chips that are ready for the market.
Link to the study