Inventors claim new microscope offers major advance for spintronics

Koichiro Yaji and Shunsuke Tsuda at the National Institute for Materials Science from Japan’s National Institute for Materials Science claim their imaging-type spin-resolved photoemission microscopy (iSPEM) offers drastic improvements for resolution and data acquisition.

Their technology employs the interaction of light with the electrons in a material to detect the relative alignment of the electron spins, with particular focus on polarisation, or collective alignment of spins in a specific direction.

“Compared to conventional machines, our iSPEM machine drastically improves the data acquisition efficiency by ten-thousand times, with a more than ten-times improvement in spatial resolution, ” said Yaji. 

Writing in the journal Science and Technology of Advanced Materials, he stated: “This offers tremendous opportunities for characterizing the electronic structure of microscopic materials and devices at previously inaccessible levels in the sub-micrometre region.” 

The iSPEM comprises three interconnected ultra-high vacuum chambers for preparing and analysing samples. Electrons are emitted from the sample by absorbing light energy, accelerated through the apparatus, then analysed by interaction with a spin filter crystal, with results are displayed as images. 

The hope is that the technology could benefit information processing and so-called ‘spintronics’ applications, leading to energy-efficient and faster electronic devices, including quantum computers, suggested Yaji, who added the duo planned to investigate developing a new generation of electron spin-based devices, “because it will let us look into the properties of tiny and structurally complex samples previously hidden from view”.