Laptops may run at room temperature with new technology

“Our research looks at the spin of electrons, tiny particles that naked eyes cannot detect,” the Texas A&M professor explains. “The directions they spin can be used to record and process information.”

 

To process information, Sinova says, it is necessary to create information, transmit the information and read the information. How these are done is the big question.

 

“The device we designed injects the electrons with spin pointing in a particular direction according to the information we want to process, and then we transmit the electrons to another place in the device but with the spin still surviving, and finally we are able to measure the spin direction via a voltage that they produce,” Sinova explains.

 

The biggest challenge to creating a spin-based device is the distance that the spins will survive in a particular direction.

 

“Transmission is no problem. You can think for comparison that if the old devices could only transmit the information to several hundred feet away, with our device, information can be easily transmitted to hundreds of miles away,” he says. “It is very efficient.”

 

Talking about its practical application, Sinova is very optimistic. “This new device, as the only all-semiconductor spin-based device for possible information processing, has a lot of real practical potential,” he says. “One huge thing is that it is operational at room temperature, which nobody has been able to achieve until now. It may bring in a new and much more efficient way to process information.”

via Technology May Cool The Laptop - Texas A&M University News & Information.