Nanowerk October 15, 2021
Electrical control of spins at the nanoscale offers significant architectural advantages in spintronics. However, the electric-field sensitivities reported so far are rather weak. An international team of researchers (UK, Spain) showed that one path is to identify an energy scale in the spin spectrum that is associated with a structural degree of freedom with a substantial electrical polarizability. They studied an example of a molecular nanomagnet in which a small structural distortion establishes clock transitions in the spin spectrum; the fact that this distortion is associated with an electric dipole allowed them to control the clock-transition energy to an unprecedented degree. They demonstrated coherent electrical control of the quantum spin state and exploited it to independently manipulate the two magnetically identical but inversion-related molecules in the unit cell of the crystal. The findings pave the way for the use of molecular spins in quantum technologies and spintronics…read more. TECHNICAL ARTICLEÂ
The spin–electric coupling experiment. Credit: Nature Physics (2021)Â