FAYETTEVILLE, Ark. - A team of University of Arkansas physicists has won a National Science Foundation grant to study spintronics, a revolutionary method of making devices that use an electron’s spin, or magnetic properties, to produce high-speed information transfer using less power.

Vincent LaBella, Paul Thibado, Laurent Bellaiche and William "Lin" Oliver III have won the first NSF Focused Research Group grant awarded in the state of Arkansas, joining institutions such as Cornell University, California Institute of Technology, University of Illinois, MIT and Rice University. They will receive $500,000 over three years to do basic research in spintronics, a new field that may change the future of electronics.

"One of the big problems today is that the current means to make devices smaller will be used up in 10 to 20 years," LaBella, research assistant professor of physics, said. Currently, researchers are exploring different ways to continue making smaller, faster devices, including quantum computing and spintronics.

Using the spin of the electrons should enable researchers to make multifunctional devices, where a single multifunctional device would replace hundreds of conventional devices, leading to faster, smaller electronics that consume less power. But so far no one has been able to make the electronics work. Up until now, researchers have been unable to transfer electrons from metal contacts to semiconductor surfaces without disrupting their spin orientation. They end up with half or more of the electrons having spins in the wrong direction.

"There’s a lot unknown as to what is going on here," LaBella said.

The team will study the mechanisms behind the electronics using Scanning Tunneling Microscopy (STM) to inject electrons into different surfaces at varying temperatures, and will use light emission to examine the results. They will create the surfaces using a state-of-the-art Molecular Beam Epitaxy (MBE) facility. They will try to maximize the efficiency of the spin orientation within the substance, thus putting the right spin on things.

The researchers will use the structural information obtained from STM to perform total-energy calculations and provide a detailed picture of the local electronic and electromagnetic field properties of the surface. This will help them identify the theoretical mechanisms responsible for disrupting the electron’s spin.

They also will work with Su-Huai Wei, staff scientist with the theory group at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) on the theoretical component of these studies, allowing students to travel to the NREL to conduct research.