LOS ANGELES, May 29 (Xinhua) -- A University of Utah-led team has discovered that a class of "miracle materials" called organic-inorganic hybrid perovskites could be a game changer for future spintronic devices.
The new findings, reported online Monday in Nature Physics, shows that organic-inorganic hybrid perovskites are a promising material class for spintronics.
Spintronics uses the direction of the electron spin, either up or down, to carry information in ones and zeros. Compared to traditional electronics that use the ebb and flow of electrical current to generate digital instructions, a spintronic device can process exponentially more data. But physicists have struggled to make spintronic devices a reality.
According to the new study, scientists discovered that the perovskites possess two contradictory properties necessary to make spintronic devices work, the electrons' spin can be easily controlled, and can also maintain the spin direction long enough to transport information, a property known as spin lifetime.
"It's a device that people always wanted to make, but there are big challenges in finding a material that can be manipulated and, at the same time, have a long spin lifetime," Sarah Li, the lead author of the study and assistant professor in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Utah, said in a statement. "But for this material, it's the property of the material itself that satisfies both."
