A new spin on organic semiconductors

“Organic semiconductors have not been realistic candidates for spintronics so far because it was impossible to move spins around a polymer circuit far enough without losing the original information,” said co-first author Dr Deepak Venkateshvaran, also from the Cavendish Laboratory. Most experiments on studying spin in organic semiconductors have found that electron spins and their charges move together, and since the charges move more slowly, the spin information doesn’t go far: typically only a few tens of nanometres. “Organic semiconductors that have both long spin transport lengths and long spin lifetimes are promising candidates for applications in future spin-based, low energy computing, control and communications devices, a field that has been largely dominated by inorganic semiconductors to date,” said Venkateshvaran, who is also a Fellow of Selwyn College.

Source: www.cam.ac.uk