Spintronics

It is known that current electronics will become unfeasible as devices (transistors, among others) further decrease in size. State-of-the-art computer chips have around 100 billion transistors, accompanied by significant heat generation, while the quantum limit is on the horizon. In this scenario, Spintronics emerges as a proposal. Unlike traditional electronics, Spintronics considers not only the charge of electrons but also their spin. The generation, manipulation, and detection of spin currents have gathered great interest academically and industrially due to minimal thermal dissipation in current propagation and, consequently, information.

Under the guidance of Flávio Garcia and Luiz Sampaio (and their amazing lab members) at the Brazilian Center for Research in Physics, we investigated which materials are suitable to generate spin currents. We grew thin bilayer films of permalloys together with different pure elements, and using ferromagnetic resonance, we measured their energy dissipation in the form of angular momentum. As the theory of magnetic susceptibility predicts, this dissipation is proportional to the damping mechanism in the LLG equation. Finally, we employed the inverse spin hall effect as an experimental means to measure the amount of angular momenta in the form of coherent spin current. A final report paper is available here.