Scientists image 'magnetic semiconductors' on the nanoscale

In a first-of-its-kind achievement, scientists at the University of Iowa, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and Princeton University have directly imaged the magnetic interactions between two magnetic atoms less than one nanometer apart (one billionth of a meter) and embedded in a semiconductor chip.

The findings, scheduled for publication as the cover story of the July 27 issue of the journal Nature, bring scientists one step closer toward realizing the goal of building a very advanced semiconductor computer chip. The chip would be based upon a property of the electron called "spin" and the related technology of "spintronics," according to Michael Flatté, professor in the UI College of Liberal Arts and Sciences Department of Physics and Astronomy and leader of the UI research group.

"With spintronics, data manipulation and long-term storage can be conducted in one computer chip, rather than separately in a CPU and a hard drive as currently practiced. The data manipulation could also be done quicker and require less power. Such a computer would be much smaller in size and use less energy," Flatté says.

He adds that some 20 years ago, researchers at IBM discovered that an ordinary semiconducting material, indium arsenide, could be made magnetic at low temperatures by introducing a very small number of magnetic atoms. The magnetic atoms they added were manganese, and soon many other "magnetic semiconductors" were discovered. Gallium arsenide, a semiconductor material used for high-performance devices in cell phones, becomes magnetic when manganese is added, but only at a temperature of -88 C (-126 F). In order for it to be used in future computer chips, magnetic semiconductors like gallium manganese arsenide must remain magnetic at higher temperatures and also be made "cleaner," or less resistant to current flow.

"Visualizing the magnetic interactions on the nanoscale may lead to better magnetic semiconductor materials and applications for them in the electronics industry," says Flatté, who along with UI Assistant Research Scientist Jian-Ming Tang predicted that the magnetic interactions could be imaged with a scanning tunneling microscope. "An electron behaves as if it carries a small magnet around with it. This property, called "spin," has not been used in computer chips to date. If the materials are good enough, then new computer chips that require much less power to run are possible. Even revolutionary 'quantum computers' that use strange quantum phenomena of the atomic world to perform calculations may be possible," says Flatté.

Flatté and Tang had predicted that the magnetic interactions should depend strongly on where in the crystal lattice of the semiconductor the atoms were sitting. Some configurations interacted very strongly and others very weakly. "We thought it would require a lot of luck to see this effect. Usually when manganese is placed in gallium arsenide, it enters the lattice in many different positions. To see two manganese atoms within a nanometer of each other, but isolated from all other manganese, would be statistically very unlikely," he says.