New technology can 'cool' laptops

London, Oct 30 : Heating up of your laptop will soon be a thing of the past, for researchers have developed a new technology that could help keep it cool.

Jairo Sinova, physics professor at Texas A&M University, and his colleagues have explained that with laptops getting increasingly powerful and their sizes getting smaller, they are excessively heating up, which tends to become a headache.

“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,” Nature quoted Sinova as saying.

“Theoretically, excessive heat may melt the laptop,” he adds.

“This also wastes a considerable amount of energy,” said Sinova.

And his research could find a new approach towards an alternative way to process information.

“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,” he said.

He said that for processing information, it is necessary to create information, transmit the information and read the information, but it is not yet know how these are done.

“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,” explained Sinova.

The biggest challenge to creating a spin-based device is the distance that the spins will survive in a particular direction.

“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,” he said.

“This new device, as the only all-semiconductor spin-based device for possible information processing, has a lot of real practical potential,” he says. “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 added.

The study has been published in the renowned journal Nature Physics.

--ANI