83 research outputs found
Local charge and spin currents in magnetothermal landscapes
A scannable laser beam is used to generate local thermal gradients in
metallic (Co2FeAl) or insulating (Y3Fe5O12) ferromagnetic thin films. We study
the resulting local charge and spin currents that arise due to the anomalous
Nernst effect (ANE) and the spin Seebeck effect (SSE), respectively. In the
local ANE experiments, we detect the voltage in the Co2FeAl thin film plane as
a function of the laser spot position and external magnetic field magnitude and
orientation. The local SSE effect is detected in a similar fashion by
exploiting the inverse spin Hall effect in a Pt layer deposited on top of the
Y3Fe5O12. Our findings establish local thermal spin and charge current
generation as well as spin caloritronic domain imaging
Optimizing the growth conditions of Al mirrors for superconducting nanowire single-photon detectors
We investigate the growth conditions for thin (less than 200 nm) sputtered
aluminum (Al) films. These coatings are needed for various applications, e.g.
for advanced manufacturing processes in the aerospace industry or for
nanostructures for quantum devices. Obtaining high-quality films, with low
roughness, requires precise optimization of the deposition process. To this
end, we tune various sputtering parameters such as the deposition rate,
temperature, and power, which enables 50 nm thin films with a root mean square
(RMS) roughness of less than 1 nm and high reflectivity. Finally, we confirm
the high quality of the deposited films by realizing superconducting
single-photon detectors integrated into multi-layer heterostructures consisting
of an aluminum mirror and a silicon dioxide dielectric spacer. We achieve an
improvement in detection efficiency at 780 nm from 40 % to 70 % by this
integration approach.Comment: 11 pages, 6 figure
All Oxide Ferromagnet/Semiconductor Epitaxial Heterostructures
Oxide based ferromagnet/semiconductor heterostructures offer substantial
advantages for spin electronics. We have grown (111) oriented Fe3O4 thin films
and Fe3O4/ZnO heterostructures on ZnO(0001) and Al2O3(0001) substrates by
pulsed laser deposition. High quality crystalline films with mosaic spread as
small as 0.03 degree, sharp interfaces, and rms surface roughness of 0.3 nm
were achieved. Magnetization measurements show clear ferromagnetic behavior of
the magnetite layers with a saturation magnetization of 3.2 muB/f.u. at 300 K.
Our results demonstrate that the Fe3O4/ZnO system is an intriguing and
promising candidate for the realization of multi-functional heterostructures.Comment: 4 pages, 3 figure
Scaling behavior of the spin pumping effect in ferromagnet/platinum bilayers
We systematically measured the DC voltage V_ISH induced by spin pumping
together with the inverse spin Hall effect in ferromagnet/platinum bilayer
films. In all our samples, comprising ferromagnetic 3d transition metals,
Heusler compounds, ferrite spinel oxides, and magnetic semiconductors, V_ISH
invariably has the same polarity. V_ISH furthermore scales with the
magnetization precession cone angle with a universal prefactor, irrespective of
the magnetic properties, the charge carrier transport mechanism or type. These
findings quantitatively corroborate the present theoretical understanding of
spin pumping in combination with the inverse spin Hall effect
Scaling behavior of the spin pumping effect in ferromagnet/platinum bilayers
We systematically measured the DC voltage V_ISH induced by spin pumping
together with the inverse spin Hall effect in ferromagnet/platinum bilayer
films. In all our samples, comprising ferromagnetic 3d transition metals,
Heusler compounds, ferrite spinel oxides, and magnetic semiconductors, V_ISH
invariably has the same polarity. V_ISH furthermore scales with the
magnetization precession cone angle with a universal prefactor, irrespective of
the magnetic properties, the charge carrier transport mechanism or type. These
findings quantitatively corroborate the present theoretical understanding of
spin pumping in combination with the inverse spin Hall effect
Use of ChIP-Seq data for the design of a multiple promoter-alignment method
We address the challenge of regulatory sequence alignment with a new method, Pro-Coffee, a multiple aligner specifically designed for homologous promoter regions. Pro-Coffee uses a dinucleotide substitution matrix estimated on alignments of functional binding sites from TRANSFAC. We designed a validation framework using several thousand families of orthologous promoters. This dataset was used to evaluate the accuracy for predicting true human orthologs among their paralogs. We found that whereas other methods achieve on average 73.5% accuracy, and 77.6% when trained on that same dataset, the figure goes up to 80.4% for Pro-Coffee. We then applied a novel validation procedure based on multi-species ChIP-seq data. Trained and untrained methods were tested for their capacity to correctly align experimentally detected binding sites. Whereas the average number of correctly aligned sites for two transcription factors is 284 for default methods and 316 for trained methods, Pro-Coffee achieves 331, 16.5% above the default average. We find a high correlation between a method's performance when classifying orthologs and its ability to correctly align proven binding sites. Not only has this interesting biological consequences, it also allows us to conclude that any method that is trained on the ortholog data set will result in functionally more informative alignments
Towards Oxide Electronics:a Roadmap
At the end of a rush lasting over half a century, in which CMOS technology has been experiencing a constant and breathtaking increase of device speed and density, Moore's law is approaching the insurmountable barrier given by the ultimate atomic nature of matter. A major challenge for 21st century scientists is finding novel strategies, concepts and materials for replacing silicon-based CMOS semiconductor technologies and guaranteeing a continued and steady technological progress in next decades. Among the materials classes candidate to contribute to this momentous challenge, oxide films and heterostructures are a particularly appealing hunting ground. The vastity, intended in pure chemical terms, of this class of compounds, the complexity of their correlated behaviour, and the wealth of functional properties they display, has already made these systems the subject of choice, worldwide, of a strongly networked, dynamic and interdisciplinary research community. Oxide science and technology has been the target of a wide four-year project, named Towards Oxide-Based Electronics (TO-BE), that has been recently running in Europe and has involved as participants several hundred scientists from 29 EU countries. In this review and perspective paper, published as a final deliverable of the TO-BE Action, the opportunities of oxides as future electronic materials for Information and Communication Technologies ICT and Energy are discussed. The paper is organized as a set of contributions, all selected and ordered as individual building blocks of a wider general scheme. After a brief preface by the editors and an introductory contribution, two sections follow. The first is mainly devoted to providing a perspective on the latest theoretical and experimental methods that are employed to investigate oxides and to produce oxide-based films, heterostructures and devices. In the second, all contributions are dedicated to different specific fields of applications of oxide thin films and heterostructures, in sectors as data storage and computing, optics and plasmonics, magnonics, energy conversion and harvesting, and power electronics
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