About
Kiggu | 24 | ENBY | Chronically ill | US ￫ UK | Biology
I am made this blog to track my progress, stay accountable and make friends.
I am a American currently living in the UK. I like learning new things and sharing them. English is my first language and I am currently learning Finnish and Potawatomi. So if I make any mistakes please correct me. Feel free to DM me or send Asks if you have any questions or just want to chat.
I like to share my daily life: So I will be posting my ups and my downs, photos notes, resources and anything I find cool and interesting. ( I am not the most aesthetic note taker but I do take good nature photos. (´｡•◡•｡`)
My Tags
My Daily Posts #kiggudaily
Notes #kiggunotes
Photos #kigguphotos
Life update and more personal stuff #kigguupdate
(I will add more tags as I make them)
My main blog is @witchy-kiggy My art Blog is @kiggumew
˚˖𓍢ִ໋🍃˚.⋆☁️ tea and textbooks Instagram ˚˖𓍢ִ໋🍃˚.⋆☁️
Hello all I am so sorry for leaving and not posting for a while. I was going through a lot of personal things that made it a bit difficult to find the motivation to post.
I am doing better now and I am feeling motivated to start posting agian.
I will resume posting study content and inspo starting tommarrow.
₊˚✧August 19, 2025 ✧˚₊‧
I am back from my hiatus, I am gonna do some blog house keeping
What I did today:
I updated my about post
Add a new tag #kigguupdate where I will post more personal life updates
Some photos from my trip to Bristol Botanical Gardens. Its my favourite spot to visit on the weekends and just relax.
I kinda forgot about this blog and that is why I haven't updated you all in a while. I am hoping to do a better job at keeping this blog up to date with my daily studies, writing, and photography stuff.
A series of posts where I will explain bits and pieces of physics I have gathered throughout the my foray into this wonderful science. Warning, these will be long.
Highly inspired by @chemblrish and @minmin-vs-physics 's posts on their fields, check out their posts (linked on this post in various places!)
Wait what even is going on?
Okay, first of all, why are we even talking about spintronics, whatever that means? Now, we live in an age where we need devices, right? Phones, TVs, laptops, name it. All digital devices come under electronics, which is a cluster of what we call "logic devices" (verrry loosely speaking) with various functions, made with expert circuitry to create our sophisticated "smart" devices. Whew. That's a lot of words. But what does it mean? It means that the very device you're using to view this post is made up of very tiny mini devices, which are made to utilize electrical signals (current, flow of electrons) to make it store information, read information, or perform logic tasks ("AND", "OR" "NOT" and the rest. Let me know if you want me to explain those, but this is not the point of the post so I'm letting them hang in the air for now).
We store digital information in the form of 'bits' (I swear all of this is relevant, please be patient) which is a computer's language of storing and using information. If you've watched any show involving hacking, you'll see stacks after stacks of "1"s and "0"s on their high contrast screens in that radioactive green font (general older sister advice: don't use high contrast it hurts your eyes), these are bits and the basis on which logic devices work. Each combination of 1s and 0s makes a different information, which is the backbone of computing. Now, how these devices make 1s and 0s is again a whole course on electronics, so I will skip over it to just preface that they exist and that's how we make digital devices.
All these years, we have used semiconductors, which allow moderate amount of current flow from them (in contrast to conductors, which allow free flow of electrons, and insulators, which do not allow flow of electrons) to make transistors, which are currently the building blocks of circuit-making devices.
[here's a picture containing ICs (the bug-like looking thing covered in wires) which have tiny transistors inside them, and the LEDs, on which the lit ones are "1"s and unlit ones are "0"s. This was my project for one of my courses!]
In electronics, a very famous law called Moore's Law, states that for increase in tech and development, the amount of transistors in integrated circuits (IC) doubles every two years. This moves proportionally with the increase in use of semiconductors, because transistors are made using them.
Every device maker's main goal is to make a device faster, smoother, and more functional. Which means, more transistors, better semiconductors. Moreover, the smaller space occupied by the ICs, the better. But obviously there's a limit to how much we can decrease the size of the transistors. One is the technical issue of creating such a small object, which will require highly precise instruments which we are not in possession of/ not feasible in the long run. The second issue is the working. "Will a semiconductor keep it's properties when they layer is so small?" is a valid question to ask when we go further down in scale. In simple words: in the long run, improving semiconductors for transistors will be difficult. Moore's law plateaus, and the number of transistors doesn't double with two years. What now? We can't just stop developing better computing devices, not just smart devices, astronomy, medicine and other scientific areas also require reliable, stable and fast computing devices.
Which means we desperately need new materials (and techniques) for logic and memory devices.
Hold on, when's spintronics going to start?
Okay background information done. Now we move onto spins and why we use it. We know that atoms are made of protons, electrons and neutrons. Out of these, electrons "revolve" in "orbits" around the nucleus, which holds the protons and neutrons. I put "revolve" and "orbits" in quotes because essentially it's a cloud of probabilities and we have no clue what path it truly takes. Electrons reside in what are called 'orbitals', which are balloon-like spaces which have a high probability of the electrons being present in (@/chemblrish explains orbitals better here).
Now along with the "revolution", electrons also considered to have a "spin". We don't really know if it "spins" the way Bayblades do, but regardless, they have an angular momentum, which is classically something rotating objects possess (@/mimin-vs-physics goes more in depth on quantum mechanical fun stuff) Either way, we don't know why it has angular momentum, but we know it does (at least I have no idea if we've figured it out??). And in true human fashion, we see anything new and think "now how can I utilize this for my benefit?"
Years and years of research later, we figured out something interesting. The angular momentum which the electron spins contain, and the angular momentum of electrons in "orbits" can interact! This interaction is called Spin-Orbit Coupling (SOC) and it causes a bunch of other fascinating phenomena in quantum mechanics. One of which, is that it if we supply electricity into a metal plane, we can align the electrons and their spins in such a way that it causes a stream of current (remember: current is essentially a flow of electrons in one direction) with aligned spins to move into a different layer perpendicularly.
Okay but what does all of this have to do anything with Spintronics?
We're finally at the part where we can discuss what Spintronics is! We can use our now generated spin current to make electronic devices (hence, spintronics!). So, how do we make these tiny devices?
What we first take is a heavy metal (these are metallic elements/alloys with high atomic numbers, which have a lot of free electrons to use) and make a very thin film of it. (The procedure of making thin films is very interesting, and I will make the next post on it!) We can now pass a stream of current/electricity* parallel to the surface of the thin film, which will give us a stream of spin-aligned electrons bouncing to move into an upper layer.
For the upper layer, we add a thin layer of a ferromagnet. A ferromagnet is a type of material which readily aligns its spin on one direction when under a magnetic field (contrary to this are paramagnets which weakly align their spins, and diamagnets which weakly align their spins opposite to the applied field).
Now remember the electrons with their spin aligned which wanted to move into the upper layer? Yeah once they are given an upper layer to move into, they flow into the layer, bringing their aligned spins with them. This spin can now affect the ferromagnet's spin, and align it in either the direction of the applied electric field ( the one applied on the heavy metal layer. I'm marking it as * for you to check which electric field I mean) or directly opposite to the direction of the electric field. This alignment can be measured. The value doesn't matter, only the direction. Is it parallel to the electric field or anti-parallel? "Up" or "down"? "Left" or "right"? Or, in terms of electronics, "1" or "0".
And look! We now have a way to make a tiny device which can display values of "1" or "0"! We used an analog signal (electricity) to create a digital output (1s and 0s)! That is electronics! But because it uses spins, it is called Spintronics.
Because we use Spin-Orbit Coupling, these devices are extremely precise and fast. And the layers of heavy metal/ferromagnet will be in the ranges of nanometers (10^-9 m), so they are also extremely small. We can also choose materials with properties we like (high melting/boiling point, low reactivity) to create devices which can work in extreme conditions (high heat, pressure, reactive areas).
And here we have it! We've made spintronic devices!
End of post disclaimer: I am a Bachelors student and I will have mistakes. I also tend to exaggerate. So if I have made a mistake in this post, please inform me nicely in the comments or tags!
Busy day, too busy for my taste but had some nice moments. One more day and I'll have a week off. I am really looking forward to not having to get up with an alarm. That makes such a big difference for me.
this week has been actually exhausting for me, i have been sick for a couple of days and i had a very packed work schedule along with lots of things i needed to study for but somehow i survived the hectic days and can finally take a long rest.
Looking for active studyblrs and gradblrs to follow!
Hi!! My name is Kinoko and I'm working on my masters in addiction counseling and clinical counseling. I absolutely bombed the summer semester, so I'm looking for some inspiration and motivation!
🐬 Well, I woke up at 11pm. Usually I wake up at 3 or 4am so this was a big surprise. Starting to take after my pastry chef mother for sure.
🦈 It's 5am currently. I have two more hours until I need to leave to go grocery shopping. With my promotion to a better position (that somehow pays less), money is tight. I'm setting a $50 budget for food for each week. Gonna be a struggle.
👑 Things I've gotten done so far today:
Wrote a Slowly letter. Been procrastinating that.
Relaxed for an hour. SO necessary and I neglect self-care SO bad!
Completed all the homework for the week for school.
Drafted and submitted 3 different scholarship essays
Drafted 5 chapters of my book, Rot. Hoping to get it all drafted before August ends.
I'm hoping to deep-clean 3 areas of my room before I head to work today. It's gotten SO messy in here and it's honestly overwhelming. Something needs to change!
What have been your biggest goals lately? How are you breaking it down into bite-sized pieces?
making more progress in Practical Malware Analysis this weekend. I borrowed my partner's iPad to test out notetaking with it and it was fun, but I've learned that I really struggle when I don't have physical paper in front of me. it's something related to spatial awareness I think - if I have physical paper, I remember where things are on the page and what the pages look like in relation to each other, and that helps me structure the information in my mind & remember it better.
I want to figure out how to keep my notes for career-related learning. I have an Obsidian vault partially set up because I want my notes to be linked and easy to search, but typed notes just aren't my thing. I'll figure it out eventually, I guess? maybe this is an excuse to buy a new notebook lol.
I did a bit of reading today. I am rereading braiding sweetgrass and annotating the book this time through. I haven't really done much today as I was helping my parents build a shed. I hope to get some more studying done as well as setting up this blog more.
What I did today:
I re- read a few chapters and started annotating this book.
