The Condensed Matter & Surface Sciences Colloquium series presents Hidekazu Saito of the National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science & Technology in Japan on Thursday, Dec. 12, at 4:10 p.m. in Walter Lecture Hall 245.
Saito will discuss “Electrical Creation of Spin Polarization in Ge at Room Temperature.”
“A research field of ‘spintronics,’ which utilizes spin degrees of freedom in solid state systems, has attracted attentions both from fundamental science and applications perspectives,” says Saito. “So far, the commercial products in this field, such as read head of hard disk drive and magnetic random access memory, have been based on the metal-based magneto-resistive device. The introduction of the spins into semiconductor has emerged in recent years because combination of spins with the modern semiconductor devices offers exciting opportunities for new functionality and performance. One of the main goals in the field of semiconductor spintronics is to develop a spin-utilized field-effect transistor (Spin-FET) [1,2], in which the source and drain are ferromagnetic contacts to create and detect the spin-polarized electrons transported in a semiconductor channel.
“Electrical creation of spin-polarized carriers in semiconductors at room temperature is the crucial first step to realize the spin-FETs. Up to now, the spin-polarized carrier has been successfully induced at room temperature in Si [3] and GaAs [4] using a ferromagnetic tunnel contact. For the semiconductor channel material, a p-type Ge should be important since the mobility of holes is about three times higher in Ge than in Si, enabling the fabrication of high-performance FETs.
“In this talk, we mainly present our recent studies in the electrical creation of spin-polarization in p-type Ge from a ferromagnetic tunnel contact [5-8] and demonstrate the successful spin creation at room temperature.”
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