With the impending end of traditional Si based electronics due to Moore's law limitations, the need for novel approaches to next generation device design is not only apparent, but has become a popular interdisciplinary research topic. From research in fabrication engineering and device architectural design to devices based on intrinsically different physics, there is ample room for research from physics, chemistry, and engineering perspectives. From June 13th to 17th, the SPICE Young Research Leaders Workshop was held to approach the problem from a primarily materials perspective aiming to use external stimuli such as classical gating, ionic liquid gating, optical excitation, magnetic field control, strain, etc. to cause large physical property changes in Dirac and Weyl materials due to their unique, sensitive and modifyable Fermi surfaces. Together with co-organizer Jairo Sinova, the organizers Mazhar Ali and Binghai Yan brought together 22 young experts in theoretical and experimental physics, solid state chemistry, and electrical engineering in a multi-disciplinary collaborative effort to quickly bring the exciting new physics of Dirac and Weyl materials to practical application. Through the foundations laid in this workshop, we hope to spark a new field of electronics, discover new materials, new properties, new physics, and possibly create devices based on changing between fundamental states of matter.

For videos of the talks and further information, visit the workshop home page.

This week, SPICE hosted a Workshop boosting the new field of Quantum Acoustics‐ a phonon analogue of quantum optics on chip – where single phonons in the form of high‐frequency surface acoustic waves (SAWs) propagate in acoustic waveguides coupling remote qubits. The team of organisers consisted of Göran Johansson (Chalmers, Sweden), Christopher Bäuerle (CNRS, France), Paulo Santos (PDI, Germany) and Floris Zwanenburg (Twente, Netherlands). They brought together three scientific communities which have not interacted substantially before, i.e. Surface Acoustic Waves, Solid State Spin Qubits and Superconducting Qubits. In the beautiful location of Schloss Waldthausen, fifty-two international scientists used talks, discussions and a poster session to explore contact points and potential synergies for these three fields. We thank the organizers and all participants for a successful workshop.

For videos of the talks and further information, visit the workshop home page.

On October 23rd and 24th, SPICE hosted the 29th REIMEI and ERATO-SQR workshop. The organisers Junichi Ieda and Jairo Sinova brought together leading theorists and experimentalists to work on effects of the spin-orbit interaction and the coupling of the spin and lattice degrees of freedom in magnetic nanostructures.

Being an efficient spin current detector and generating so-called spin-orbit torques on proximity magnets, the spin Hall effect has moved into the mainstream of magnetism. The electrical and thermal actuation of the magnetization of insulators with extremely high quality factors of the magnetization dynamics has focused attention on the bosonic degrees of freedom in spintronics and the importance of the spin-lattice and spin-rotation couplings.

The scope of the workshop covered the topics:

• The magnon-phonon interaction in a magnetic insulator (YIG) to better understand acoustically induced spin pumping and the spin Seebeck effect.
• Materials with large spin-orbit interaction examined by combining density functional theory in the local density approximation with the quantum Monte Carlo technique.
• The effects of spin-orbit interaction on the magnetization dynamics of ferro-, feri-, and antiferro-magnets and their heterostructures.
• Spin current generation in solids and fluids.

For more information,visit the workshop website.