We rely heavily on electronics for virtually everything we do. But actually, it does not necessarily need to be electrons that do all the job. Edoardo Albisetti, an Assistant Professor at Politecnico Milano, does his research on magnonic circuits that rely on spin currents as information carriers.

To create the magnonic circuits, Edoardo Albisetti and his colleagues combine thermal scanning probe lithography with field-cooling. First, the NanoFrazor’s tip locally heats the layered magnetic material, and then the spot cools down in the presence of a predefined magnetic field, locking the spin orientation in the material. Moving the tip around the sample, one can “draw” domain walls, define vortices and skyrmions, and magnonic nanoantennae.

In his interview to The Lithographer, Prof. Albisetti tells us more about this exciting field of research and what kind of applications it can enable in computing and signal processing. (Download the magazine to read the interview, p. 42)