Punjab Study

Lahore: 25 Jan: Lahore University of Management Sciences (LUMS) Lahore has announced that The Spin Physics Group at the Department of Physics, SSE has managed to draw PKR 20 million as funding from the Higher Education Commission (HEC). Dr. Sabieh Anwar, Chair, Department of Physics is the P.I. for the research project. The three-year funding will allow him to establish some key experimental facilities, notably atomic layer deposition by sputtering and a high-end pulsed laser for time-dependent optical studies. The project will contribute to the development of new avenues in magnetic landscape mapping, magnetic microscopes, and magnetic resonance at the nano-scale.
Dr. Anwar's research focuses on probing spins with light, nuclear magnetic resonance and developing health care devices for the masses. Conventional electronic devices have used the electron’s charge as the property of choice, but the electron possesses, in addition to its charge, another fundamental property called the spin. The spin can also be manipulated for the design of high-speed, low-noise and heat-dissipation-free micro and nanoelectronic devices. The exploitation of the spin property has led to the blossoming of the field of spintronics, which is aptly called "Electronics free of charge".
The hard disks currently used in computers use the spin property of the electron. Combining spin with heat seems counter-intuitive: spintronics require a pristine cold environment which is easily defeated by heating. However, recently, a resurgence of interest in the spin analogue of the Seebeck effect has been witnessed, that was originally discovered in 1827. In the spin Seebeck effect, a temperature gradient inside a ferromagnetic sample sustains spin polarisation over long distances, much longer than typical spin diffusion lengths. The spin-caloritronic effects appear even at room temperatures, a pre-requisite for spintronic devices of any practical use. Spin caloritronics successfully combines heat and spin
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