Young scientist discovers magnetic material unnecessary to create spin current

It doesn't happen often that a young scientist makes a significant and unexpected discovery, but postdoctoral researcher Stephen Wu of the U.S. Department of Energy's Argonne National Laboratory just did exactly that. What he found—that you don't need a magnetic material to create spin current from insulators—has important implications for the field of spintronics and the development of high-speed, low-power electronics that use electron spin rather than charge to carry information.

Wu's work upends prevailing ideas of how to generate a current of spins. "This is a discovery in the true sense," said Anand Bhattacharya, a physicist in Argonne's Materials Science Division and the Center for Nanoscale Materials (a DOE Office of Science user facility), who is the project's principal investigator. "There's no prediction of anything like it."