News in Press-centre

The researchers of Far Eastern Federal University (FEFU) created new ultrathin materials for the new type of electronics: Spin-Orbitronics. The staff of the Laboratory of Thin Film Technologies and the Laboratory of Electron Microscopy and Image Processing of the FEFU School of Natural Sciences obtained the world's first polycrystalline three-layer Ruthenium-Cobalt-Ruthenium (Ru/Co/Ru) films with the magnetic layer of just four atomic layers thick, i.e. less than one nanometer. The result of the work was published in the prestigious scientific Journal of Physics D: Applied Physics.

Alexey Ognev, the head of the Laboratory of Thin Film Technologies, said that ultrathin polycrystalline Ru/Co/Ru films had been obtained for the first time in FEFU. The films have such important functional property as perpendicular magnetic anisotropy. According to the researcher, these materials will soon find wide application in the electronic devices of a new type: non-volatile magnetic memory and logic, high-sensitivity sensors, biomedical sensors, and ultrafast systems of information processing and artificial intelligence.

"Solid-state electronics has already almost reached the limit of its physical development, and now we need new approaches. One of them is to use magnetic materials with perpendicular anisotropy for ultra-dense storage and ultrafast data processing," explained Alexey Ognev. "We got polycrystalline films and nanostructures based on Ru/Co/Ru in the lab and showed how we can improve magnetic properties of cobalt by changing the thickness of non-magnetic layer of Ruthenium. Based on our structures, memory elements will provide exceptional high speed information processing and low power consumption compared to semiconductors, and the very process of production of such elements will become easier and cheaper."

Alexander Samardak, the Lab Lead Researcher, reminded that the main carrier of information in the microelectronics industry is an electron. Spin-Orbitronics is based on the transfer of spin magnetic moment, which requires much less energy than when transferring electric charge.

"Today Spin-Orbitronics is developing very actively all over the world, and engineers are facing the challenge of combining semiconductor electronics with magnetic materials. An ordinary person might feel the emergence of such hybrid structures, say, in a few years by buying a smartphone that will work for weeks without charging. It also helps to solve the global challenge of reducing energy consumption of multiple data centers and, therefore, emission of harmful substances into the atmosphere," emphasized Alexander Samardak.

It is worth noting that the FEFU researchers study Ru/Co/Ru films by using Evico Magnetics Kerr Microscope, which was acquired at the expense of the grant under the Federal Target Program and the FEFU Development Program. There are only two such devices in Russia, which allow to study the micro magnetic structure of thin films and nanostructures.