New European project for training in orbital-based electronics

Orbitronics is an emerging research field that focuses on utilizing the electron's orbital angular momentum to establish innovative information processing technologies. These orbital-based technologies will be cheap, low power, scalable and environmentally sustainable, thus having the potential to bring about revolutionary advances in microelectronics with potentially an enormous societal impact.

The European Commission has decided to fund the multidisciplinary training network “ORBital-based ElectronIcS” or ORBIS with 49.5 MSEK for a 4-years period. The network is composed of 12 European universities, 4 national research centers and 8 high-technology companies. ORBIS will train 16 young researchers in the field, by doing research in the physics of orbital currents, orbital torques, 2D and low-symmetry materials, orbital phenomena in the time domain, magnetic excitations, and topology. Cutting-edge methodologies in new materials, device nanofabrication and characterization, ultrafast spectroscopies, and state-of-the-art theoretical methodologies will be applied. The overarching scientific and technological goal of ORBIS is to understand the mechanisms behind orbital effects, to find emerging materials enabling efficient generation, transport and control of orbital angular momentum, and to build devices based on these phenomena, including enhanced THz emitters, magnetic random-access memory and beyond-CMOS logic.

ORBIS is coordinated by Felix Casanova from the nanotechnology research center CIC nanoGUNE, San Sebastian, Spain.

Physicists at Uppsala University, Jan Rusz and Peter Oppeneer, are part of the ORBIS project, with a share of 3.6 MSEK. The focus of the research at Uppsala University is to predict theoretically orbital currents and orbital torques and to develop spectroscopic tools for the detection of orbital accumulation in collaboration with network partners.

“It was very gratifying that our EU proposal received a very high score of 99.4 out of 100 points for innovation, scientific excellence and doctoral training quality and was deemed to surpass significantly existing benchmarks. The technological advances of orbital electronics are now becoming more widely noticed”, says Peter Oppeneer.