https://www.nature.com/articles/nphys2702Quote from https://www.nature.com/articles/nphys2702 They layered nonmagnetic semiconducting materials together (lanthanum aluminate (LAO, LaAlO3) and strontium titanate (STO, SrTiO3):
and got a magnetic field and conduction. They hypothesize that it is the ground state field's spiral topology which evolves the electron spin into a magnetic field. The interface between two nonmagnetic oxide materials exhibits magnetism.
In other words, they've found a way to polarize the quantum vacuum between the LAO and STO nonmagnetic layers such that the quantum vacuum spirals just as it does around the nucleus of every atom in the universe, which causes the electron spin to follow the new topology (given that it's the quantum vacuum from which electrons in orbit obtain their energy to prevent them spiraling into the oppositely-charged nucleus, as Boyer showed, as Haisch and Ibison showed, as NASA showed), evolving a magnetic field at the LAO/STO interface just as electrons orbiting their nuclei do.
In other words, they've found a way to mimic at the macro scale what happens at the quantum scale... and it's controllable via an external magnetic or electric field.
This happens at temperatures as high at 100 K (-279.67 F), but eventually they'll find the right combination which exhibits the phenomenon at room temperature.
What good is this for? Well, computer memory and the CPU could be melded into one, for instance... your computer's memory would do the processing rather than a CPU, giving rise to a much higher computing throughput.
Conversely, stacking layers of magnetic and nonmagnetic semiconductors and putting that into a magnetic field (a solid-state Stern-Gerlach device) means spin-up and spin-down electrons can be segregated (a potential barrier arises for spin-up electrons and potential well for spin-down ones)... a method of creating qubits for quantum computing.
But what interests me is that once room-temperature materials are found, we've got an aimable magnetic field... imagine a generator which can adjust its magnetic field to avoid any bEMF, which is exactly what we try to do with some of the research here.
We propose a microscopic model of electrons in Ti t2g states at the LAO/STO interface that leads to the following results: local moments form in the top TiO2 layer owing to correlations, with interfacial splitting of t2g degeneracy playing a critical role; conduction electrons mediate ferromagnetic double-exchange interactions between the moments; Rashba SOC (spin-orbit coupling) for the conduction electrons leads to a Dzyaloshinskii–Moriya interaction and a compass anisotropy term with a definite ratio of their strengths; the zero-field ground state is a long-wavelength spiral with a SOC-dependent pitch; the spiral transforms into a ferromagnetic state in an external field H.
and got a magnetic field and conduction. They hypothesize that it is the ground state field's spiral topology which evolves the electron spin into a magnetic field. The interface between two nonmagnetic oxide materials exhibits magnetism.
In other words, they've found a way to polarize the quantum vacuum between the LAO and STO nonmagnetic layers such that the quantum vacuum spirals just as it does around the nucleus of every atom in the universe, which causes the electron spin to follow the new topology (given that it's the quantum vacuum from which electrons in orbit obtain their energy to prevent them spiraling into the oppositely-charged nucleus, as Boyer showed, as Haisch and Ibison showed, as NASA showed), evolving a magnetic field at the LAO/STO interface just as electrons orbiting their nuclei do.
In other words, they've found a way to mimic at the macro scale what happens at the quantum scale... and it's controllable via an external magnetic or electric field.
This happens at temperatures as high at 100 K (-279.67 F), but eventually they'll find the right combination which exhibits the phenomenon at room temperature.
What good is this for? Well, computer memory and the CPU could be melded into one, for instance... your computer's memory would do the processing rather than a CPU, giving rise to a much higher computing throughput.
Conversely, stacking layers of magnetic and nonmagnetic semiconductors and putting that into a magnetic field (a solid-state Stern-Gerlach device) means spin-up and spin-down electrons can be segregated (a potential barrier arises for spin-up electrons and potential well for spin-down ones)... a method of creating qubits for quantum computing.
But what interests me is that once room-temperature materials are found, we've got an aimable magnetic field... imagine a generator which can adjust its magnetic field to avoid any bEMF, which is exactly what we try to do with some of the research here.