Author: martin.gmitra

The 2018 Nobel Prize in Physics goes to innovators in laser physics responsible for optical tweezers and high-intensity, ultrashort optical pulses. For more information see Physics Focus and Press Release.

Graphene’s exceptional electrical conductance makes it a prime target for spintronics technologies, which exploit the spin of the electron for data storage and transfer. However, it’s hard to manipulate the spins of graphene’s electrons because of weak spin-orbit coupling—the coupling between an electron’s spin and its motion. Researchers have circumvented this problem by placing graphene layers on transition-metal dichalcogenide (TMD) materials with strong spin-orbit coupling.…

Writing in Nature Nanotechnology, B. Huang et al. and S. Jiang et al. report the use of electrostatic gating to change not only the direction but the type of magnetic order in CrI3.