A breakthrough in quantum nanotechnology

Prof. Ivan J. Vera-Marun’s group in University of Manchester got paper ‘Spin polarised quantised transport via one-dimensional nanowire-graphene contacts’ published.

Spintronics offers a promising route to achieving low-power and high-speed computation beyond CMOS technology, and potentially to energy-efficient spin qubits for applications in quantum information processing. Graphene, according to its high carrier mobility and gate tuneable charge carrier density, has been investigated for spin transport. However, there are very few experimental studies regarding ballistic spintronics in graphene, even though the electronic mean free path can reach up to μm scales, approaching or exceeding device dimensions and giving rise to ballistic transport.

The recent publication from Prof. Ivan J. Vera-Marun’s group in University of Manchester reports the ballistic injection of spin polarised carriers via one-dimensional contacts between magnetic nanowires and a high mobility graphene channel. This is evidenced by the observation of quantised conductance through the contacts with no applied magnetic field and a transition into the quantum Hall regime with increasing field strength. This represents the first step towards the realisation of ballistic graphene spintronic devices.

This work was led by University of Manchester, UK and collaborated with the researchers from Mexico and Ecuador. If you are curious on spintronics and ballistic graphene spintronic devices, please read more here!