Spintronics

The beauty of an electron’s spin is that it responds very rapidly to small magnetic fields. Such external magnetic fields can be used to reverse the direction of spin. In this way, information can be carried by a flow of electrons. For instance, electrons with a left-hand spin could represent a “1”, and those with a right-hand spin, a “0”. It takes less time to flip the spin direction than it does to switch a current on or off. Accordingly, spintronics could potentially be very fast and...Read Full Story

IBM gave a Conference of press last Wednesday on his memories of the future and for the first time, Big Blue States that its Racetack could be a reality by the end of the Decade . In addition, by three years of capacity of 1 Po can be stored in a surface equal to a 1U rack, always according to the firm. We presented you the progress of the IBM's Racetrack last December. A reminder, this memory is based on a mechanism different from the current submissions. Instead of fetching the data bit in...Read Full Story

“The nation that controls magnetism will control the universe,” famed fictional detective Dick Tracy predicted back in 1935. Probably an overstatement, but there’s little doubt the nation that leads the development of advanced magnetoelectronic or “spintronic” devices is going to have a serious leg-up on its Information Age competition. A smaller, faster and cheaper way to store and transfer information is the spintronic grand prize and a key to winning this prize is understanding and...Read Full Story

In a recent publication in Physical Review Letters, physicists at the University of Arizona propose a way to translate the elusive magnetic spin of electrons into easily measurable electric signals. The finding is a key step in the development of computing based on spintronics, which doesn't rely on electron charge to digitize information. Just like a magnet with a north and a south pole (left), electrons are surrounded by a magnetic field (right). This magnetic momentum, or spin, could be...Read Full Story

Prof. Schattschneider from Vienna University of Technology (TU Vienna), together with colleagues from Belgium, is developing a method of producing rotating electron beams and is publishing the technology in the scientific journal "Nature". Manipulating materials with rotating quantum particles:  a team from the University of Antwerp and TU Vienna (Professor Peter Schattschneider, Institute of Solid State Physics) has succeeded in producing what are known as vortex beams: rotating electron...Read Full Story