New projects & Milestones
In 2020 the Physics and Engineering of Nanodevices Group (PEN) continued its work under the H2020 Graphene Flagship programme to develop spintronic applications with graphene and related 2D materials. The group has experimentally demonstrated anisotropic spin relaxation and observed tunable spin-to-charge conversion at room temperature in graphene caused by spin-orbit proximity effects from a transition metal dichalcogenide. It has also continued making progress in exploring the spin properties of materials with large spin-orbit interaction —in particular, topological insulators grown in a dual-chamber molecular beam epitaxial (MBE) system—, in developing spin torque measurements in topological insulator and ferromagnet structures, and in the study of proximity effects by ferromagnetic insulators and molecules.
Work has also been carried out within the context of the new project “Engineering the Spin and Thermoelectric Properties the Nanostructured Two-Dimensional Materials (ENGINE2DM)”, supported by the Spanish Ministry of Economy, Industry and Competitiveness (MINECO), dedicated to the study of the spin Hall effect, of the charge and spin transport properties of graphene, of the electrical injection and detection of hot carriers, and of the spin-to-charge conversion efficiency in graphene/metal hybrids.
The group coordinates two European projects launched in 2019. The TOCHA project (“Dissipationless topological channels for information transfer and quantum metrology”, FET-PROACTIVE), funded under the Horizon 2020 EU Research and Development Programme, has the ambition of harnessing topological concepts for future generation of devices and architectures across which information can flow with low losses. This conceptually simple, yet technologically and fundamentally challenging, requirement is crucial for the development of technologies in fields ranging from information processing to quantum communication and metrology. In each of these areas, the dissipation of information is a key hurdle that leads, for example, to unacceptable thermal loads or error rates.
The 2DSPINMEM project (Functional 2D materials and heterostructures for hybrid spintronic-memristive devices, M-ERA) explores group-IV monochalcogenides (IV-MCs) materials and aims to perform the first ever evaluation of their potential as memristors, as well as to implement graphene-based heterostructures to control graphene spin properties by changing the memristive setting of the chalcogenides.
The group participates in the SpinTronicFactory network to coordinate EU spintronics activities and represents the Bellaterra node of the Spanish Spintronics Network. In 2019, the group has been awarded an ERC Proof of Concept and a MIT-LaCaixa Seed Fund, which was launched in May 2020.