Associate Professor
Kavli Institute for Theoretical Sciences
University of Chinese Academy of Sciences
Mamoru Matsuo graduated with a Ph.D. in high energy physics from The University of Tokyo in 2008. After that, Mamoru changed his research field to spintronics. Nano-devices work by manipulating electrical charges but generates heat. Towards devices with lower energy consumption, Mamoru’s lab manipulates spin currents and flows of electron spin angular momentum, which produces very little heat. Conventional methods for generating spin currents require either magnets or rare metals and they cannot use common materials such as Cu. Several years ago, he proposed an alternating way of the spin-current generation via the coupling between spin and mechanical motion in moving materials and succeeded in generating spin current in Cu. Interestingly, his lab uses general relativistic theory for analyzing the spin dynamics in moving materials. Their approach is closely related to that used in cosmology.