Putting a new spin on computer hardware
Luqiao Liu was the sort of child who would moderately take his toys aside to see how they labored than play with them the best way they have been meant.
Curiosity has been a driving power all through his life, and it led him to MIT, the place Liu is a newly tenured affiliate professor within the Division of Electrical Engineering and Laptop Science and a member of the Analysis Laboratory of Electronics.
Slightly than taking issues aside, he’s now utilizing novel supplies and nanoscale fabrication methods to construct next-generation electronics that use dramatically much less energy than typical gadgets. Curiosity nonetheless is useful, he says, particularly since he and his collaborators work within the largely uncharted territory of spin electronics — a area that solely emerged within the Eighties.
“There are a lot of challenges that we should overcome in our work. In spin electronics, there may be nonetheless a spot between what might be carried out essentially and what has been carried out up to now. There’s a lot nonetheless to check by way of getting higher supplies and discovering new mechanisms so we will attain larger and better efficiency,” says Liu, who can be a member of the MIT-IBM Watson AI Lab.
Electrons are subatomic particles that possess a elementary quantum property referred to as spin. One method to visualize that is to consider a spinning high that circulates round itself, which supplies the highest angular momentum. That angular momentum, a product of the spinning high’s mass, radius, and velocity, is named its spin.
Though electrons don’t technically rotate on an axis like a high, they do possess the identical sort of spin. Their angular momentum might be pointing “up” or “down.” As a substitute of utilizing constructive and destructive electrical fees to symbolize binary data (1s and 0s) in digital gadgets, engineers can use the binary nature of electron spin.
As a result of it takes much less vitality to vary the spin path of electrons, electron spin can be utilized to change transistors in digital gadgets utilizing a lot much less energy than with conventional electronics. Transistors, the essential constructing blocks of contemporary electronics, are used to manage electrical indicators.
Additionally, because of their angular momentum, electrons behave like tiny magnets. Researchers can use these magnetic properties to symbolize and retailer data in pc reminiscence {hardware}. Liu and his collaborators are aiming to speed up the method, eradicating the velocity bottlenecks that maintain again lower-power, higher-performance pc reminiscence gadgets.
Interested in magnetism
Liu’s path to learning pc reminiscence {hardware} and spin electronics started with fridge magnets. As a younger baby, he puzzled why a magnet would persist with the fridge.
That early curiosity helped to spark his curiosity in science and math. As he delved into these topics in highschool and faculty, studying extra about physics, chemistry, and electronics, his curiosity about magnetism and its makes use of in computer systems deepened.
When he had the chance to pursue a PhD at Cornell College and be a part of a analysis group that was learning magnetic supplies, Liu discovered the proper match.
“I spent the subsequent 5 – 6 years trying into new and extra environment friendly methods to generate electron spin present and use that to jot down data into magnetic pc reminiscences,” he says.
Whereas he was fascinated by the world of analysis, Liu needed to strive his hand at an business profession, so he joined IBM’s T.J. Watson Analysis Middle after graduate college. There, his work centered on creating extra environment friendly magnetic random entry reminiscence {hardware} for computer systems.
“Making one thing lastly work in a commercially obtainable format is sort of essential, however I didn’t discover myself absolutely engaged with that sort of fine-tuning work. I needed to point out the viability of very novel work — to show that some new idea is feasible,” Liu says. He joined MIT as an assistant professor in 2015.
Materials issues
A few of Liu’s most up-to-date work at MIT entails constructing pc reminiscences utilizing nanoscale, antiferromagnetic supplies. Antiferromagnetic supplies, comparable to manganese, include ions which act as tiny magnets because of electron spin. They organize themselves in order that ions spinning “up” and people spinning “down” are reverse each other, so the magnetism cancels out.
As a result of they don’t produce magnetic fields, antiferromagnetic supplies might be packed nearer collectively onto a reminiscence system, which results in larger storage capability. And their lack of a magnetic area means the spin states might be switched between “up” and “down” in a short time, so antiferromagnetic supplies can swap transistors a lot quicker than conventional supplies, Liu explains.
“Within the scientific neighborhood, it had been underneath debate whether or not you may electrically swap the spin orientation inside these antiferromagnetic supplies. Utilizing experiments, we confirmed you can,” he says.
In his experiments, Liu usually makes use of novel supplies that have been created only a few years in the past, so all their properties should not but well-understood. However he enjoys the problem of integrating them into gadgets and testing their performance. Discovering higher supplies to leverage electron spin in pc reminiscences can result in gadgets that use much less energy, retailer extra data, and retain that data for an extended time frame.
Liu takes benefit of the cutting-edge gear inside MIT.nano, a shared 214,000-square-foot nanoscale analysis middle, to construct and take a look at nanoscale gadgets. Having such state-of-the-art services at his fingertips is a boon for his analysis, he says.
However for Liu, the human capital is what actually fuels his work.
“The colleagues and college students are probably the most treasured a part of MIT. To have the ability to focus on questions and discuss to people who find themselves the neatest on the planet, that’s the most gratifying expertise of doing this job,” he says.
He, his college students, and colleagues are pushing the younger area of spin electronics ahead.
Sooner or later, he envisions utilizing antiferromagnetic supplies in tandem with current applied sciences to create hybrid computing gadgets that obtain even higher efficiency. He additionally plans to dive deeper into the world of quantum applied sciences. For example, spin electronics might be used to effectively management the move of data in quantum circuits, he says.
In quantum computing, sign isolation is essential — the data should move in just one path from the quantum circuit to the exterior circuit. He’s exploring using a phenomenon referred to as a spin wave, which is the excitation of electron spin inside magnetic supplies, to make sure the sign solely strikes in a single path.
Whether or not he’s investigating quantum computing or probing the properties of recent supplies, one factor holds true — Liu continues to be pushed by an insatiable curiosity.
“We’re frequently exploring, delving into many thrilling and difficult new matters towards the objective of creating higher computing reminiscence or digital logic gadgets utilizing spin electronics,” he says.