Component incorporates spin and molecular electronics

At just one nanometre in diameter, the current device represents something of a breakthrough and compares with carbon nanotube-based transistors that are on the scale of tens of nanometres.

In the current project, the researchers demonstrated that the organic molecule hydrogen-phthalocyanin, also used as blue dye in ball pens, exhibits a strong magneto-resistance effect when trapped between electrodes, potentially opening up a variety of applications.

‘The immediate impact will be in new sensors for hard disks — but this is just the beginning,’ said lead researcher Prof Wulf Wulfhekel of the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) in Germany.

‘The use of spin for information encoding has several advantages — it’s non-volatile so you don’t need power to save the state of your machine. If you switch off your computer and switch it back on again you don’t need to boot up.

‘And also the power consumption is far lower, so this has advantages for mobile devices especially.’