14 DAY TRIAL // Texas A&M University Physics Professor Jairo Sinova believes that he may have discovered a novel way of keeping laptop temperatures low, while also giving information technology a new and unique twist. According to the expert, the instances in which your laptop is simply too hot to sit on your lap may soon become a thing of the past. As processors get faster and faster, they emit increasing amounts of heat, which means that, shortly, the little computers will simply be too hot to handle.
“The crux of the problem is the way information is processed. Laptops and some other devices use flows of electric charge to process information, but they also produce heat. Theoretically, excessive heat may melt the laptop. This also wastes a considerable amount of energy,” the expert reveals. As the electrons making up the electrical current get lost from the circuits, and are emitted into the environment as heat, the computer itself needs to draw large amounts of power from the grid, in order to keep its performance levels high.
In a paper published in the latest issue of the renowned journal Nature Physics, Sinova reveals that the new solution he is proposing was developed in cooperation with scientists and colleagues from the Hitachi Cambridge Laboratory, the Institute of Physics ASCR, as well as the University of Cambridge and the University of Nottingham, in the United Kingdom. The scientist says that one of the most obvious answers to the whole problem is to change the way in which information is processed inside the computers. If that is changed, then there would be no reasons for the temperature to build up.
“Our research looks at the spin of electrons, tiny particles that naked eyes cannot detect. The directions they spin can be used to record and process information. The device we designed injects the electrons with spin pointing in a particular direction according to the information we want to process, and then we transmit the electrons to another place in the device but with the spin still surviving, and finally we are able to measure the spin direction via a voltage that they produce,” the scientist explains. The main challenge that stands in front of this research is determining over what distances these electrons can survive, and after which point they begin to disintegrate and lose the information they store.
“Transmission is no problem. You can think for comparison that if the old devices could only transmit the information to several hundred feet away, with our device, information can be easily transmitted to hundreds of miles away. It is very efficient,” Sinova adds. “This new device, as the only all-semiconductor spin-based device for possible information processing, has a lot of real practical potential. One huge thing is that it is operational at room temperature, which nobody has been able to achieve until now. It may bring in a new and much more efficient way to process information,” he concludes.