Prof. Luqiao Liu

Professor Liu is an expert in the properties of magnetic materials and their application to non‐volatile memory and spin based logics,his research aims to use spin based electronics to solve the power, scaling and speed issues associated with conventional semiconductor devices.

Research focuses on exploring new materials and mechanisms that can be used as building blocks for spintronic devices which operate at high speed with low power consumption. Compared to current electronic devices which are built by controlling electrical charge of electron, spintronic devices are built by manipulating spins of the electron. At a high level, this falls under the much bigger umbra of Quantum Computing and Quantum Cryptography. In comparison with other spintronic research at MIT, for instance, led by Professors Ross and Beach in Material Science, which focuses more on fundamental mechanism for manipulating spins of the electrons.

The spintronic material and device group focuses on understanding the generation, transportation and detection of electron spins in solid state materials, as well as the dynamics of ensemble of electron spins, i.e., nanoscale ferromagnets. We look into the spin-related physics in nanoscale structures. We develop new materials, fabricate novel devices for future computation and communication applications.

One topic that we have been looking into is the spin orbit interaction induced phenomena in solid state materials. Electron spin orbit interaction in solids give rise to various interesting physics phenomena such as spin Hall effect, spin momentum correlated surface states in topological insulator, the coupling of spin and valley in 2 dimensional semiconductors and non-zero spin momentum in polar superconductors, etc. We carry out electrical transport measurement to verify and quantify these effects, as well as study the influence of these effects onto the dynamics of nanomagnets.

One important goal of Liu's research lies in utilizing the effects mentioned above to make low power, high speed electronic devices. As one of the beyond-CMOS technologies, spintronics have the advantage of non-volatility, high efficiency and good scalability. We work on optimizing the writing and reading mechanisms of spintronic devices, with the goal of making better magnetic memory and spin-based logic devices, which can implement and replace some of the existing electronic devices.