Every year, science discovers new ways to fit more information into smaller and smaller electronic chips. This miniaturization is so overwhelming that it has already surpassed the merely atomic limits of matter – it has reached the quantum level.
Conversely, the dreams and prospects of Gilvânia Vilela, 37, from Pernambuco, expand without stopping. Since she was little, in the municipality of Cabo de Santo Agostinho, she wanted to understand how the world and nature work. Her curiosity grew with the pace of her career: today she is one of the world’s leading experts in spintronics, the branch of physics essential to the creation of quantum computers.
Coming from public schools, women and from the Northeast, Gilvânia pierced the technology market bubble, predominantly white, male and upper-middle class, to reach one of the most prestigious institutions in the world: the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), where he did his postgraduate studies, between 2017 and 2019. In the first year, with a Capes scholarship. In the second, at the invitation of MIT itself.
Vilela, in one of the MIT laboratories
Image: Personal archive
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The relationship remains fruitful to this day. Currently, Gilvânia teaches at the University of Pernambuco (UPE) and is a focal point of the MIT Brazil program, which brings students from all over the country to the institution in Cambridge.
“I want to do what I could so that this opportunity expands to more Brazilians, showing my students that they can carry out research with an international impact and place themselves in the market in a competitive way”, he explains.
“My stay at MIT completely changed how I do research. It showed the importance of maintaining a collaborative network around a scientific topic to promote rapid advances.”
His next breakthrough: computers so powerful they will revolutionize every aspect of our lives.
the power of spin
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A chip is made up of microcircuits that pack billions of transistors. These transistors turn on or off according to the passage of an electric current, thus generating the “zeros” and “ones” that are the basis of the entire language of computers.
Electric current is nothing more than a transfer of electrons – the negatively charged particle that helps make up atoms. But with smaller and smaller chips, and with increasing capacities, science now needs to resort to a property of the electron to activate transistors: the so-called spin.
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So, if the equipment that used the electric current generated the electronics, nothing more natural that the new generation has been called spintronics. And she is not just the “future”: she is already here.
“Most sensors for reading the hard disk head [de um computador] already use an effect of spin, called giant magnetoresistance”, explains Gilvânia.
What the future holds is an even wider application. Spin increases the speed of information processing so drastically that it even allows the development of new computational algorithms.
“It’s a natural demand with the popularization of big data [ciência que analisa quantidades gigantescas de dados simultaneamente] and the arrival of the Internet of Things [IOT, na sigla em inglês], for example. Several devices need to be linked together, so the processing speed needs to be higher. There is an urgency to develop these means,” he continues.
(un)heated market
In electronics, the passage of electric current generates energy loss in the form of heat. You’ve certainly noticed this in practice, when your computer has processed a lot of information, like in a very complex game. The fan (or “cooler”) is turned on to help cool the equipment.
Spintronics offers a solution to this problem – and this is exactly one of Gilvânia’s focuses today. She studies how to excite and control spin waves to transport data without heat loss, which would improve computer performance.
“It’s like when we throw a pebble into the lake and it forms waves that propagate. Spin waves can be deliberately excited and controlled to carry information without associated electrical current”, explains Gilvânia Vilela.
“No associated electrical current” is a key point: his research may also help to develop non-volatile magnetic memories or spintronic memories (MRAM’s). In other words: the information is stored even without power supply, because they make use of magnetic materials for recording data.
The expectation, according to Gilvânia, is that the technology will become cheaper in the next eight years and by 2030 it will be able to reach an industrial scale. However, like so many other advances in the past, these innovations will arrive first in industry and in wealthier sectors. Only then to the final consumer.
“The biggest vision is to develop things for robotics, medicine, distribution and energy, artificial intelligence, machine learning, defense. And there are several applications, not only in computers”, he says.
“There is an intense race and a lot of investment from international bodies applied in this area of research. It will be the revolution in computing through quantum mechanics. The main research institutions in the world are developing projects on this topic — including the participation of Brazilians. Our society demands better computers”, he concludes.
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