Cen­ter for Spin­elec­tronic Ma­te­ri­als and De­vices

Ma­te­ri­als and Thin Films

In par­tic­u­lar, new ternary and qua­ter­nary ma­te­ri­als from the Heusler fam­ily can be pre­pared and char­ac­ter­ized. For the de­vel­op­ment of new ma­te­ri­als ra­tio­nal de­sign by com­puter sim­u­la­tions (DFT) is em­ployed to screen for an­tic­i­pated prop­er­ties such as spin po­lar­i­sa­tion, mag­neti­sa­tion, anisotropy or mag­netic damp­ing. With state-​of-the-art thin film de­po­si­tion and analy­sis tools rang­ing from sputter-​ via e-​beam- to MBE-​deposition ad­vanced thin film sys­tems can be pre­pared, char­ac­terised and sup­plied to in­ter­ested groups to ex­per­i­men­tally ver­ify the the­o­ret­i­cal ma­te­r­ial screen­ing.
The tech­no­log­i­cal plat­tform in­cludes an in­dus­tri­ally rel­e­vant sys­tem for prepa­ra­tion of thin film sys­tems on large sub­strates.

De­vices

For ex­per­i­ments on de­vices, the cen­ter pro­vides the in­te­gra­tion of newly de­vel­oped thin film ma­te­ri­als in mag­netic tun­nel junc­tions (MTJs) which can be pat­terned down to a size below 100nm by e-​beam lith­o­g­ra­phy. The cen­ter sup­plies lay­out pro­pos­als to in­ter­ested re­searchers and sub­se­quently cus­tomized sam­ples for ex­per­i­ments on, e.g., dy­nam­ics or trans­port. Sam­ples can be pre-​characterized in CSMD by, e.g., struc­tural and sta­tic trans­port mea­sure­ments.

Ap­pli­ca­tions

The Cen­ter is open for con­tribut­ing to the de­vel­op­ment of in­dus­tri­ally rel­e­vant pro­to­types for a va­ri­ety of ap­pli­ca­tion fields:

• Non volatile Ran­dom Ac­cess Mem­o­ries based on Spin Trans­fer Torque
• Re­lated and field pro­gram­ma­ble mag­netic logic gates
• Mag­netic Sen­sors with high sen­si­tiv­ity to de­tect ul­tra­small mag­netic fields
• Sen­sor ar­rays for mag­netic cam­eras to scan in­for­ma­tion in, e.g., se­cu­rity sys­tems for prod­uct con­trol
• Sen­sors for mag­ne­tore­sis­tive Biochips ca­pa­ble to de­tect small con­cen­tra­tions of, e.g., an­ti­bod­ies, DNA se­quences or pro­teins.