Researchers working at the Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) coupled graphene, a monolayer form of carbon, with thin layers of magnetic materials like cobalt and nickel to produce exotic behavior in electrons that could be useful for next-generation computing applications.
The work was performed in collaboration with French scientists including Nobel Laureate Albert Fert, an emeritus professor at Paris-Sud University and scientific director for a research laboratory in France. The team performed key measurements at Berkeley Lab's Molecular Foundry, a DOE Office of Science User Facility focused on nanoscience research.
Fert shared the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2007 for his work in understanding a magnetic effect in multilayer materials that led to new technology for reading data in hard drives, for example, and gave rise to a new field studying how to exploit and control a fundamental property known as "spin" in electrons to drive a new type of low-energy, high-speed computer memory and logic technology known as spintronics.
In this latest work, published online May 28 in the journal Nature Materials, the research team showed how that spin property – analogous to a compass needle that can be tuned to face either north or south – is affected by the interaction of graphene with the magnetic layers.
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