Washington: Scientists have discovered that information can flow through a diamond wire, which might pave way for faster and more powerful computers.
Scientists carried out an experiment at The Ohio State University and got to know that diamond transmits spin better than other metals. Worldwide researchers are also working on developing a new concept called ‘spintronics’, which could make computers simultaneously faster and more powerful.
“The Diamond wires are hard, transparent, electrically insulating, impervious to environmental contamination, resistant to acids, and doesn't hold heat as semiconductors do,” said Chris Hammel, Lead Investigator . It cost a mere USD 100, since it is made of synthetic, rather than natural, diamond.
Electrons attain different spin states according to the direction in which they're spinning up or down. Hammel's team placed a tiny diamond wire in a magnetic resonance force microscope and detected that the spin states inside the wire varied according to a pattern. The wire contained just one nitrogen atom for every three million diamond atoms, but that was enough to enable the wire to carry spin.
The physicists were also able to observe electron spin on a smaller scale than ever before. They focused the magnetic field in their microscope on individual portions of the wire and found that they could detect when spin passed through those portions. The wire measured only four micrometres long and 200 nanometres wide.
A magnetic coil in the microscope was also keenly observed by the scientisits, which switched on and off over tiny fractions of a second, generating pulses that created 15-nanometre wide snapshots of electron behaviour.
