A new study conducted at the University of Vienna, the Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems in Stuttgart, and the Helmholtz Centers in Berlin and Dresden takes an important step in the challenge to miniaturize computing devices and to make them more energy-efficient.
The work, published in Science Advances, opens up new possibilities for creating reprogrammable magnonic circuits by exciting spin waves by alternating currents and redirecting these waves on demand.
The central processing units (CPUs) that we use in our laptops, desktops or even phones use billions of transistors, which are based on the complementary metal oxide semiconductor (CMOS) technology. With the increasing need to miniaturize these devices, several physical limitations are raising concerns about their sustainability. In addition, high power consumption and energy losses push scientists to search for alternative computing architectures.
One of the promising candidates are magnons, the quanta of spin waves. "Imagine a calm lake. If we let a stone fall into water, the resulting waves will propagate away from the point of generation. Now, we replace the lake with a magnetic material and the stone with an antenna. The propagating waves are called spin waves and can be used to transfer energy and information from one point to another with minimal losses," says Sabri Koraltan from the University of Vienna, first author of the recent study.
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