Akash Kumar

A magnet in a microchip is like a compass needle that needs to be turned without touching it. Usually, heavy metals are used for this, but they heat up and waste energy. Physicists have found a replacement — a layered material called GeTe, which resembles a stack of ultra-thin sheets.

Every oscillator carries its own compass, built into the crystal lattice. Until now, spin Hall nano-oscillators, tiny microwave sources driven by spin current, could not do without an external magnet: it was the magnet that set the common axis around which the magnetization oscillated.