The strong collaborative ethos of the Graphene Flagship is accelerating developments in new technologies based on graphene -- the single-atom-thick allotrope of carbon -- and related materials (GRMs) such as transition metal dichalcogenides (TMDCs).
Graphene's excellent tuneable electronic properties make it an ideal material for spintronics applications. Leading the way in three recent papers, Flagship researchers have shown that GRMs can be combined to produce an unprecedented spin lifetime anisotropy, essential for furthering spintronics -- electronic circuits and devices based on the manipulation of electron spins. The papers were published almost simultaneously in Physical Review Letters, Nano Letters and Nature Physics.
"These results represent a first step to achieving direct electric-field tuning of the propagation of spins in graphene," said ICREA Prof. Sergio O. Valenzuela, a researcher at the Catalan Institute of Nanoscience and Nanotechnology (ICN2; Spain), and an author of the experimental results in Nature Physics. "A graphene-TMDC structure responds as a spin filter with a transmission determined by the orientation of the spins that reach it, allowing detection of small orientation changes."
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