Electric Field Control of Spin Transport

Spintronics is an approach to electronics in which the spin of the electrons is exploited to control the electric resistance R of devices. One basic building block is the spin-valve, which is formed if two ferromagnetic electrodes are separated by a thin tunneling barrier. In such devices, R depends on the orientation of the magnetisation of the electrodes. It is usually larger in the antiparallel than in the parallel configuration. The relative difference of R, the so-called magneto-resistance (MR), is then positive. Common devices, such as the giant magneto-resistance sensor used in reading heads of hard disks, are based on this phenomenon. The MR may become anomalous (negative), if the transmission probability of electrons through the device is spin or energy dependent. This offers a route to the realisation of gate-tunable MR devices, because transmission probabilities can readily be tuned in many devices with an electrical gate signal. Such devices have, however, been elusive so far. We report here on a pronounced gate-field controlled MR in devices made from carbon nanotubes with ferromagnetic contacts. Both the amplitude and the sign of the MR are tunable with the gate voltage in a predictable manner. We emphasise that this spin-field effect is not restricted to carbon nanotubes but constitutes a generic effect which can in principle be exploited in all resonant tunneling devices.Comment: 22 pages, 5 figure

A Study of Software Development for High Performance Computing

Software development in a High Performance Computing (HPC) environment is non-trivial and requires a thorough understanding of the application and the architecture. The objective of this paper is to study the software development process in a high performance computing environment and to outline the stages typically encountered in this process. Support required at each stage is also highlighted. The modeling of stock option pricing is used as a running example in the study. 1 Introduction Software development in any High Performance (Parallel/Distributed) Computing (HPC) environment is a non-trivial process and requires a thorough understanding of the application and the architecture. This is apparent from the fact that applications currently achieve only a fraction of peak available performance [Zor92]. HPC software development requires the developer to resolve and tune a large number of available design options. For example, during the course of software development, the developer i..