Magnetic Graphene Clouds Can Be Made To Appear And Disappear
Magnetic Graphene University of Manchester Toggling graphene's magnetic field on and off could lead to faster, smaller electronics. Add another point to the list of reasons why graphene, the darling child of material physics, is a wunderkind. A team led by researchers at the University of Manchester has succeeded in turning magnetism on and off in graphene, an important step for the field of spintronics, the study of the way electrons spin in solid-state physics. Spintronic memory has great theoretical potential to make computers faster and more efficient, but scientists have struggled to switch magnetic fields on and off the way electronic transistors do. As announced in Nature Communications last week, we might come a little closer to spintronic transistors with graphene. When carbon atoms in graphene's honeycomb-like structure are removed, electrons around the resulting holes form clouds that act like microscopic magnets. The researchers found the electronic clouds...