A barrier to practical spintronic devices has been lowered as room-temperature ferromagnetic semiconductors created in an international collaboration involving FLEET’s Xiaolin Wang.
While semiconductor spintronics promise lower switching energy and faster speed, a major limitation on its development as a viable technology is the lack of room temperature ferromagnetic semiconductor materials.
A collaborative study between researchers from two Chinese universities and the University of Wollongong investigated growth-controlled engineering of magnetic exchange interactions in single crystalline films by controlling oxygen vacancy and carrier density.
Strong ferromagnetism, spin-split impurity states, and spin-polarised electrical transport were created, and were well controlled at room temperature.
This room-temperature ferromagnetic semiconductor, which offers the ability to individually control carrier density and magnetic doping, will lay a solid foundation for the development of practical spintronic devices operating at room temperature.
The study was reported in Chemistry of Materials February 2017.
Co-author Xiaolin Wang leads the Atomically Thin Materials Enabling Technology project within FLEET. New, atomically thin materials form the bedrock of FLEET research, including for topological materials (Research Theme 1), as hosts for excitons (Research Theme 2) and for creating, temporary (non-equilibrium) topological phenomena (Research Theme 3).