SPINTROS - Spin Transport in Organic Semiconductors

The SPINTROS project is focused on spintronics, an area of electronics that aims to exploit the spin of the electron. Although it is one of the areas selected to play a role in the post-CMOS electronics, spintronics still has to prove its full potential in many fields. A particularly important role that is missing is the long-distance spin transport and manipulation. Organic semiconductors (OSC) can play an important role in the development of spintronics as they have very small spin-orbit and hyperfine interactions, which lead to very long spin coherence times and make them ideal for spin transport. However, the basic mechanisms of spin injection, transport, and manipulation in OSC are still obscure, thus impeding further advances in the field. The objective of this project is to understand and control spin transport in organic semiconductors. To achieve this ambitious objective we will employ a multidisciplinary approach, merging materials science, electronics, and physics. In the two initial workpackages, we will study the unique combination of ferromagnetic spin-polarized injectors and OSC spin transporters, especially their energetic and magnetic interactions at the interface. We will also create optimized organic field-effect transistors (OFET) with nanometre channel lengths, the only device that would allow us to understand spin transport in a controllable fashion. In the third workpackage we will create and investigate the Spin OFET. Thanks to this device we will quantify the spin coherence length of OSC and we shall be able to control spin transport either by external (magnetic or electric field) or internal (crystallographic) effects. Finally, we will produce and characterize spin single molecular FETs. With this radical downscaling we will explore effects inaccessible in other transport regimes. For example, we will look at the direct coupling between the spin and molecular vibrational modes, or at the effect of the spin on the Kondo effect.