NANOSPIN

NT-MDT is an official industrial partner in NANOSPIN project.

NANOSPIN is an EU funded project to manufacture and study the behaviour of magnetic nanoparticles comprising a core and multiple-shells. These so-called nano-onions have far ranging applications in medical nanotechnology, magnetic recording and quantum devices.

Overall Scientific and Technological objectives

The overall scientific objective of NANOSPIN is to design and prepare complex magnetic nanoparticles composed of a metallic core and one or more shells of ferromagnetic or antiferromagnetic metals and to understand their behaviour in order to control their magnetic properties (blocking temperature, anisotropy, exchange bias, spin quantum barrier height, etc.). The overall technological objectives are to functionalise the nanoclusters to enable them to be produced as ordered arrays on surfaces and to demonstrate proof of principle in classical and quantum single-particle data storage.

The production of Multiple Shell Nanoparticles (nano-onions)

The multiple-shell clusters will be produced by metal condensation in superfluid liquid He droplets (Figure). Large helium droplets, formed by expansion of liquid helium into vacuum via a pinhole nozzle, are skimmed to form a collimated beam and pass through pickup cells where they acquire evaporated metal atoms. The atoms move through the droplet, coagulate to form clusters, and cool to an ultra-low temperature on a sub microsecond timescale. In contrast, the journey time between each pickup cell is milliseconds and so shell formation in one cell is complete before the droplet reaches the next cell. This will allow discrete shell structures to form sequentially.

The project addresses an increasingly important aspect of nanotechnology, that is, how to functionalise the properties of the individual building blocks. The degree of control possible with the production technique described above and the ability to add extra shells of ferromagnetic (F) and antiferromagnetic (AF) materials would enable one, in principle, to design the internal spin configuration of an individual nanocluster. Adding a final non-magnetic shell will promote the ordering of arrays of the functionalised nanoclusters on surfaces. This degree of control will have an enormous impact on technological areas of spintronics and magnetic storage such as ultrahigh density magnetic recording media and quantum computing.

NT-MDT responsible person is Andrew Shubin.