Over the past decade, there has been a great deal of interest in graphene with regards to its electrochemical behavior. Previous studies have focused on understanding fundamental processes such as charge transfer and molecular transport at the graphene-electrolyte interface as well as on applications of graphene in electronic, optical, and mechanical systems. We present illustrative examples of large area, single layer graphene platforms for applications such as optical and sensing devices as well as microfluidic systems.

Magnetic devices are a leading contender for the implementation of memory and logic technologies that are non-volatile, that can scale to high density and high speed, and that do not wear out. However, widespread application of magnetic memory and logic devices will require the development of efficient mechanisms for reorienting their magnetization using the least possible current and power.

We report on the fabrication and characterization of magnetic tunnel junctions consisting of a single layer of graphene as the tunnel barrier, sandwiched between two metallic ferromagnetic electrodes. We employ a fabrication process chosen to minimize oxidation of the electrode materials at the ferromagnet/graphene interfaces. The devices have low resistance-area products of 1.5-6 m2, with low-temperature magnetoresistances of 1.5-3.4%. The temperature and bias dependencies of the resistance confirm that transport is dominated by tunneling processes rather than by any unintended pinholes.

We investigate the effect of a direct current on propagating spin waves in a CoFeB/Ta bilayer structure. Using the micro-Brillouin light scattering technique, we observe that the spin-wave damping and amplitude may be attenuated or amplified depending on the direction of the current and the applied magnetic field. Our work suggests an effective approach for electrically controlling the propagation of spin waves in a magnetic waveguide and may be useful in a number of applications such as phase-locked nano-oscillators and hybrid information-processing devices.

We report that strong perpendicular magnetic anisotropy of the ferromagnetic layer in a W/CoFeB/MgO multilayer structure can be established by inserting a Hf layer as thin as 0.25 nm between the W and CoFeB layers. The Hf spacer also allows transmission of spin currents generated by an in-plane charge current in the W layer to apply strong spin torque on the CoFeB, thereby enabling current-driven magnetic switching. The antidamping-like and field-like components of the spin torque exerted on a 1 nm CoFeB layer are of comparable magnitudes in this geometry.

We study deterministic magnetic reversal of a perpendicularly magnetized Co layer in a Co/MgO/Ta nanosquare driven by spin Hall torque from an in-plane current flowing in an underlying Pt layer. The rate-limiting step of the switching process is domain wall (DW) depinning by spin Hall torque via a thermally assisted mechanism that eventually produces full reversal by domain expansion. An in-plane applied magnetic field collinear with the current is required, with the necessary field scale set by the need to overcome DW chirality imposed by the Dzyaloshinskii-Moriya interaction.

We model 100 ps pulse switching dynamics of orthogonal spin transfer (OST) devices that employ an out-of-plane polarizer and an in-plane polarizer. Simulation results indicate that increasing the spin polarization ratio, C P = PIPP/POPP, results in deterministic switching of the free layer without over-rotation (360° rotation). By using spin torque asymmetry to realize an enhanced effective PIPP, we experimentally demonstrate this behavior in OST devices in parallel to anti-parallel switching.

Using transient absorption (TA) microscopy as a hot electron thermometer, we show that disorder-assisted acoustic-phonon supercollisions (SCs) best describe the rate-limiting relaxation step in graphene over a wide range of lattice temperatures (Tl = 5-300 K), Fermi energies (EF = ± 0.35 eV), and optical probe energies (∼0.3-1.1 eV). Comparison with simultaneously collected transient photocurrent, an independent hot electron thermometer, confirms that the rate-limiting optical and electrical response in graphene are best described by the SC-heat dissipation rate model, H = A(T e3 - Tl3).

Two electrons on a string form a simple model system where Coulomb interactions are expected to play an interesting role. In the presence of strong interactions, these electrons are predicted to form a Wigner molecule, separating to the ends of the string. This spatial structure is believed to be clearly imprinted on the energy spectrum, yet so far a direct measurement of such a spectrum in a controllable one-dimensional setting is still missing. Here we use an ultraclean carbon nanotube to realize this system in a tunable potential.

Two-pulse excitation at a graphene p-n junction generates a time-dependent photocurrent response that we show functions as a novel ultrafast thermometer of the hot electron temperature, Te(t). The extracted hot electron cooling rates are consistent with heat dissipation near the Fermi level of graphene occurring by an acoustic phonon supercollision mechanism. © Owned by the authors, published by EDP Sciences, 2013.