INST Mohali researchers use sound waves to generate spin currents for low-power computing

A DST institute has proposed a new mechanism to generate and control magnon-based spin currents using surface acoustic waves — a spintronics advance that could cut energy loss in next-generation computing and communication.

What happened

• Researchers from the Institute of Nano Science and Technology (INST), Mohali — an autonomous institute of the Department of Science and Technology (DST) — have introduced a new mechanism to generate and control magnon-based spin currents using surface acoustic waves (SAWs).
• The work targets a core limitation of modern electronics: conventional devices move electric charge, which generates heat and energy loss. Spintronics instead carries information using the electron's spin, promising faster, smaller, more energy-efficient devices.
• Magnons — waves of magnetic disturbance inside materials — are attractive information carriers because they operate with much lower energy loss than electrons.
• PhD scholar Shivam Sharma and supervisor Prof. Abir De Sarkar built an analytical model of a 2D ultrathin, graphene-like magnetic material on a piezoelectric substrate, and showed that when SAWs travel through it they create tiny distortions behaving like 'pseudogauge fields' that drive spin currents.
• Published in Physical Review B, the approach opens possibilities for low-power, highly efficient computing, quantum computing and next-generation communication technologies.

For Prelims

• Spintronics (spin electronics): A technology that exploits the electron's intrinsic spin (and associated magnetic moment), not just its charge, to store and process information — enabling lower power use and non-volatile memory.
• Magnons: The quanta of spin waves — collective excitations of electron spins in a magnetic material. As information carriers they dissipate far less energy than moving charge (no Joule heating from current flow).
• Surface Acoustic Waves (SAWs): Sound/elastic waves that travel along the surface of a material; here generated via a piezoelectric substrate (a material that produces electric charge/strain under mechanical stress and vice-versa).
• Piezoelectric effect: The generation of electric charge in certain materials (e.g. quartz, PZT) in response to applied mechanical stress — used to launch the surface acoustic waves in this study.
• 'Graphene-like' 2D material: An atomically thin, two-dimensional material with a honeycomb-style lattice; here a magnetic (antiferromagnetic) variant that hosts magnons — distinct from plain (non-magnetic) graphene.
• INST Mohali: An autonomous institute under the DST focused on nano science and technology — one of India's premier nanotech research bodies. Distinguish DST (research funding/coordination, GS3.13) from the publication venue Physical Review B (a leading condensed-matter physics journal).
• Why it matters for the exam: The data-centre/computing energy problem and the search for low-power alternatives (spintronics, magnonics, neuromorphic computing) is a recurring S&T theme — link to India's quantum and semiconductor missions.

For Mains

Syllabus: GS3.11 · GS3.13 · Linkage L2