Keynote speakers: Molecular Spinterface — From fundamentals to applications

Information and communication technology (ICT) is calling for solutions enabling lower power consumption, further miniaturization and multi-functionality requiring the development of new device concepts and new materials. A fertile approach to meet such demands is the introduction of the spin degree of freedom into electronics devices, an approach commonly known as spintronics. This already lead to a revolution in the information storage (GMR read heads) in the last decades. Nowadays, the challenge is to bring spintronics also into devices dedicated to logics, communications and storage within the same material technology. Organic semiconductors emerged as an extraordinary spintronic material about ten years ago, when a few papers appeared with straightforward and encouraging claims on spintronics phenomena. From then on Organic Spintronics has evolved into a prolific discipline populated by a large number of experimentalists and theoreticians. This lecture will discuss the multi-functionality as an intrinsic characteristic of organic based spintronic devices leading to conceptually new device paradigms. Along this line I will especially concentrate on interfaces, representing the most important and the most hidden part of any spintronic device. Revealing their secrets is scientifically hard and experimentally costly, requiring sophisticated spectroscopic methods and massive calculations. For an interface consisting of a hard metallic electrode touching a soft organic layer, the situation obviously becomes even more complicated. The lecture will overview the main achievements of the community in the investigation of very complex and very rich interface properties and will describe the possibilities to develop and fabricate devices whose operation is fully dominated by the interface.