Christian Binek sat at his desk on Friday, reviewing new data for the presentation he gave at a conference in France over the weekend.
Binek, an associate professor of physics and astronomy at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, is the coordinator of a Materials Research Science and Engineering Centers (MRSEC) interdisciplinary research group (IRG) dedicated to finding powerful new ways to store and compute information.
Today, electronic devices rely on electrical currents to store and process data. However, electrical currents produce heat and energy losses, a major problem challenging continued innovation.
Heat is physically harming the device, Binek said.
"As our devices become smaller, the insulators become smaller as well," he said. "When the insulators are smaller, leakage currents occur. If we keep doing what we're doing, it'll be over. Growth will level off."
That's where the IRG comes in. The team explores the spin of electrons and the exploitation of their properties to store data. The team coordinated by Binek involves a number of researchers of different disciplines. Binek has worked closely with Peter Dowben, a chemistry, physics and astronomy professor who analyzes interface properties and measures magnetization at the surface, and Kirill Belashchenko, a physics and astronomy professor and an electronic structure theorist who is working on building models that can be verified
experimentally.
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