Axel Hoffmann(Materials Science Division, Argonne National Laboratory, Chicago, IL, USA)
As semiconducting electronic devices are miniaturized to ever-smaller dimensions, power dissipation becomes an ever-increasing problem due to leakage charge currents. Spintronics may help addressing some of these issues by utilizing besides the charge degree of freedom also the electron spin and the question arises, whether eliminating charge currents altogether could provide additional benefits for applications.
The scanning tunneling microscope has been an extremely successful experimental
tool because of its atomic scale spatial resolution. In recent years this has been
combined with the use of low temperatures, culminating in microvolt energy
resolution. However the time resolution of typical STM experiments is limited to about
one millisecond for spectroscopy on a single atom. In this talk we will discuss the use
of inelastic tunneling spectroscopy with low-temperature STM for the study of spins, a
technique coined spin-excitation spectroscopy.
