Tiny magnets may advance microelectronics

Researchers at Shanxi University in China have made progress in understanding the single-molecule magnet, which combines the classical macroscale properties of a magnet with the quantum properties of a nanoscale entity.

Hai-Bin Xue and colleagues studied the statistics of how electrons move through a single-molecule magnet to better understand the magnet’s inner level structure.

This study is an important step towards the development of ways to store and process information, as well as quantum computation. The results are important to the field of molecular spintronics, which combines molecular electronics with the field of spintronics, the manipulation of spin and charge.

The study, ‘Tunable electron counting statistics in a single-molecule magnet’, by Hai-Bin Xue, Y-H Nie, Z-J Li and J-Q Liang appears in the Journal of Applied Physics.