Transparent Interface with Spin Polarization Opens New Frontier in Spintronics

This new material taps into the burgeoning field of spintronics, which leverages the spin of electrons—an intrinsic property alongside charge—to drive innovative functionalities in electronics.

Researchers have unveiled a groundbreaking transparent layer that resides between two insulating materials, allowing electrons to move in a two-dimensional plane at room temperature with their spins aligned in the same direction. This advancement promises to revolutionize data transfer speeds and enhance data storage capabilities in quantum devices.

This new material taps into the burgeoning field of spintronics, which leverages the spin of electrons—an intrinsic property alongside charge—to drive innovative functionalities in electronics. Spintronics, once a theoretical concept, is now making strides with the development of advanced materials and nanoscale fabrication techniques, creating systems that exhibit these unique properties.

Scientists at the Institute of Nano Science and Technology (INST) in Mohali, India, have successfully produced a transparent conducting interface between two insulating materials, demonstrating room-temperature spin-polarized electron gas. This interface, composed of LaFeO₃ and SrTiO₃, could enable the development of see-through devices with efficient spin currents. Prof. Suvankar Chakraverty and his team at INST achieved this by growing superlattices and heterostructures of oxide materials, revealing a novel two-dimensional electron gas at the interface of these insulating oxides.

Supported by grants from the DST-Nanomission and the Board of Research in Nuclear Sciences (BRNS), and utilizing a custom-made combinatorial pulsed laser deposition setup, the research was published in the journal Physical Review B (Letters section). The LaFeO₃-SrTiO₃ interface showcased unprecedented room-temperature phenomena, including negative magnetoresistance and the anomalous Hall effect. These effects result from the structural transition of SrTiO₃ at the interface with temperature, highlighting the interface's potential for spintronic and quantum-device applications.

The research reveals that manipulating spin in transparent materials could lead to innovative spintronic devices, such as transparent phone screens that use spin currents or advanced solar cells with integrated spin manipulation. These developments point towards new device architectures and applications in transparent spintronics, dissipation-less electronics, and next-generation data storage and quantum computing technologies.